'The Book of Taliesyn' a Deep Purple vinyl LP record Album cover, designed by JVL in 1968.
The recording was made by EMI Parlophone and
Tetragrammaton Records.
This is the only record cover I have ever designed and the original artwork was never returned. A website claimed that I had carried out the artwork under the art direction of Les Weisbrich but in truth I never met him. My agent gave me the title saying that the art director wanted a ‘fantasy Arthurian touch’ and to include hand lettering for the title and the musicians’ names. I mainly drew from The Book of Taliesin, which is a collection of poems, said to be written by the sixth century Welsh bard Taliesin. I was paid 30 guineas for the job. At one time I thought I may have been given this job because the lead musician of Deep Purple was called Jon Lord. However, just before he died, Jon confirmed to me in an email that this wasn't the case. It was just a coincidence.
Nice to read your involvement on this! I first discovered this on a rather cheap cassette tape release of the album that had to squeeze the entire cover to fit half of the cassette cover itself, obliterating quite a lot of your handwriting and other details, but when I got around to finding the LP copies later on, I got to enjoy staring at it for long periods of time (although the US Tetragrammaton releases tend to appear far more fuzzy and the colors not quite the same as the EMI Harvest releases).
ReplyDeleteThis cover inspired me a bit in my art back in high school during the mid 90's. This supplement cover, though not nearly as perfect I admit, was one effort I did that saw publication as part of the school yearbook for the 1994-95 year (they had to touch up some of the artwork to get it printed though I had originally envisioned this as a wraparound cover, they ended up printing it sideways on the front side so that was a downer though I didn't fuss about it anyway).
http://studio-toledo.deviantart.com/art/Yearbook-Supplimental-Cover-18580643