June 1979, 40 years and a month ago, Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division’s debut studio album, was released. It has been named as one of the best albums of all time by publications such as NME, AllMusic, Select, and Spin. But, there’s more, the oh-so interesting story behind the legendary album cover, as told by The Magic Sugarcube:
“The cover art for Joy Division’s 1979 album Unknown Pleasures was originally published as a black-on-white science plot by Harold Craft in his 1970 PhD thesis Radio observations of the pulse profiles and dispersion measures of twelve pulsars. Page 215 shows 80 successive pulses of the first pulsar observed, CP1919, tastefully stacked on top of one another. The plot was subsequently reproduced as a white-on-red image for the cover art of the 1970 International Astronomy Union General Assembly Highlights of Astronomy edited by Cornelis De Jager, as the green-on-white image in Ostriker’s article mentioned above, as a white-on-black image in Walter Herdeg’s 1974 Graphis Diagrams: The Graphic Visualization of Abstract Data, and then in the black-on-white style in Simon Mitton’s editing of the 1977 edition of The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy.”
The post UNKNOWN PLEASURES: THE STORY BEHIND THE FAMOUS ALBUM COVER appeared first on RUDOLF DETHU.
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