… not the most perfect of The Rolling Stones’ albums, yet its 3D cover made it an instant sought-after collector item.
After recently getting a 19 cm/s pre-recorded original tape on a 18 cm diam. plastic reel, whose box sports the VERY same 3D lenticular plastic gimmick than the vinyl 1st pressing in my possession.
Strange, I told myself…
I checked Wikipedia on the matter and found this:
“The original cover design called for the lenticular image to take up the entire front cover,[20] but finding this to be prohibitively expensive it was decided to reduce the size of the photo and surround it with the blue-and-white graphic design.”
Put side-by-side, the tape and the vinyl plaque are the very same, so, apparently Decca/London spent an arm and a leg for this 3D plaque and decided to do not go over-budget using the same size on the 30 cm sized cover and making a clouds/sky frame to fix the 3D smallish size.
Tapes were quite expensive in the hey days also if not as expensive as they are now… this very pre-recorded tape is fetching USD 200+ price-tags… thei reel to reels sold poorly, so when they weren’t more in demand, Decca possibly stopped to make the 3Ds and the 2nd vinyl disc reissues had the color cover-art replaced by a cheaper pix of the 3D itself.
Such an innocent satisfaction sort-of correcting the always great, useful and supportive Wikipedia.
Yeah!
Stefano Bertoncello