Designed For Hi-Fi Living:
The Vinyl LP In Midcentury America
Widely available - Amazon often has it on sale for under $20.00. Published in full color by MIT Press.
A focus on midcentury modernism provides intriguing connections between vinyl record album cover art and wider cultural movements and design trends. Offering a fascinating glimpse into the postwar imagination, the first part, “Home,” explores how the American home entered the frontlines of Cold War debates and became an entertainment zone—a place to play music, mix drinks, and impress guests with displays of good taste. The second part, “Away,” considers albums featuring music, pictures, and tourist information that prepared Americans for the jet age as well as the space race. With in depth looks at Columbia Records’ “Adventures in Sound” series and Capitol’s “Capitol of the World” series. We describe each one to tell a story of postwar America, as part of our “Analog Rescue” project.
Praise for Designed for Hi-Fi Living
“does not demand close reading, but rewards it…delightful and entertaining.” –John Littlejohn, Popular Music and Society review.
“One of the smartest books we've ever seen on album cover art – a lavish full color volume that not only presents loads of classic images, but also has plenty to say about them as well!” –Dusty Groove Records, Chicago
Named a “Best Music Book to Broaden Your Horizons,” Goodreads
“This extraordinary and brilliantly curated book reveals how the tropes of cultured living were disseminated through the universal medium of music decades before the era of ‘designer pop’. Revisionary and essential.”– Peter Saville, artist and designer; founder and art director of Factory Records
“A great read with thematic threads (and good writing!), but it really is all about the album art. I highly recommend it to illustrators, art directors and photographers.” –Amazon reviewer
“Exploring the secret life of records, Borgerson and Schroeder comb the discarded and recovered bins of thrift-store vinyl for clues to a hidden agenda. At once hilarious and penetrating, their astute observations and thoughtful groupings cut across genre, label, and designer to reveal uncanny continuities that link jazz, rock, easy listening, self-help, exotica, folkloric, and other impossible to pin-down modalities in an eye-popping slide show of the mid-century American imaginary.” –John Corbett, writer and curator; author of Vinyl Freak: Love Letters to a Dying Medium and A Listener's Guide to Free Improvisation
“A fantastic peek back into a forgotten world.”– Goodreads reviewer
“A brilliant book in several ways. Borgerson and Schroeder use album covers as windows on the homes of the 1950s, a world much scorned and little understood. This is both a rescue mission and an exploration of the unknown.” – Grant McCracken, Twitter
About the Authors
We are an Amazon best selling creative team and have been writing about vinyl records, among other topics, for over 20 years. We call it an analog rescue project. Our work has appeared in a wide range of publications from Cool and Strange Music to the World Financial Review. Having collected records over several decades, our enthusiasm for modern design, retro aesthetics, and travel abroad found expression in our book, Designed for Hi-Fi Living: The Vinyl LP in Midcentury America. We live in Rochester, New York, surrounded by midcentury design, furniture, and a lot of records.
Check out our book, Designed for Dancing: How Midcentury Records Taught America to Dance.
Janet Borgerson
When I was young, my dad brought me copies of the new Monkees vinyl LPs, and then Rubber Soul by The Beatles and since then, I have never been without records. I divide my time between Michigan, New York, and England. I write mostly about consumer culture, aesthetics, and identity.
I studied philosophy, economics, and writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, completing postdoctoral work at Brown University. Early on, a writing fellowship from the Cranbrook Institute gave me a taste of living with modern design. My writing often draws on my background in art history, film studies, and branding.
Jonathan Schroeder
I was born in Michigan, and have lived in California, Rhode Island, Sweden, England, and New York. The first LP I remember buying is the Shaft soundtrack album.
I studied perception, music, and psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California-Berkeley. Currently, I am the William A. Kern Professor in the School of Communication, Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. I write a lot about branding, identity, photography, visual communication.