It was in 1939, while designing ads for Columbia Records, Alex Steinweiss ( first art director at Columbia Records ) suggested adding art to the company’s 78 releases, which were then generally sold in heavy paper and, for multiple-record sets, packaged in plain, book-like binding. The company took a chance on his idea—to replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching poster-like illustration—and increased its record sales eightfold in mere months. The album cover art was born.