Inventors ran wild during the years bracketing the turn of the 20th century, creating technology that repeatedly transformed the ways people heard and consumed music. It happened again a hundred years later, which makes David Suisman’s lucid account of the emergence and consolidation of the music industry particularly ­welcome.

Before the Industrial Revolution worked its magic, music was mostly an amateur (or at best ­semi­pro) affair, something one played and listened to in parlors, at dances and marches, in concert settings, and in vaudeville halls. Songs had been sold as sheet music throughout the 19th century, but the ­pub­lishers—­printers, ­really—­were small, scattered businesses. That slowly changed, and by the 1890s sheet music publishers were competing fiercely for market ­share—­for “hits”—paying song pluggers (the term survives) to sing and place songs with performers in every conceivable setting, from department stores to prisons. Thus began the process of injecting popular music into our daily lives, converting songs into commodities that were “unapologetically commercial and distinctively American.”

Naturally, such investments had to be protected, but not until the landmark Copyright Act of 1909 did U.S. law recognize something as intangible as a song as property. Suisman, an assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware (and a DJ on freeform independent radio station WFMU in Jersey City), does a ­first-­rate job of sketching the publishers’ role in drafting that legislation. But he does not entirely sympathize with the impulses behind the law, which he views as “fetishizing the composer and the composition” rather than the performance, and granting preferred status to composed music over interpreted forms, such as traditional folk or ­jazz.

He describes the boom and bust of the industry that developed around the player piano, the most successful mechanical playback device (many variations on the music box were experimented with) to emerge before and compete with the phonograph. And he details the emergence of the Victor Talking Machine Company, founded in 1901, which produced both 78 rpm discs (burying Thomas Edison’s recorded cylinders) and the majority of the devices that made it possible for ordinary people to hear, say, the superstar tenor Enrico Caruso. Finally, in a curious counterpoint to Victor’s story, he traces the rise and fall of the African-American–owned Black Swan label, which sought to prosper while serving as an instrument of social change and artistic ­expression.

These stories, all well and carefully told, expand upon Suisman’s 2003 prize-winning doctoral dissertation. As there are few documents to analyze and no survivors to interview, he was obliged to rely on trade journal puffery, the papers of key figures such as gramophone inventor Emile Berliner, and, when discussing publishing firms, the songwriting manuals of the time. Throughout 

 there wafts a faint odor of disapproval, as if Suisman wishes things had gone differently. “On the one hand,” he writes, “the recording industry’s vast offerings could seem like a Whitmanesque celebration of the great plurality of talent in American life. On the other hand, fundamental to the industry’s development was the exploitation and reinforcement of cultural hierarchy.” What he means by that, exactly, never quite gets said, and that’s a pity, for it might well have led to a fine argument on both ­sides.

Suisman writes extensively about Victor’s aggressive and ­trend­setting marketing campaigns (the record company was the largest advertiser in the United States in 1923), and its highly effective efforts simultaneously to brand Caruso (signed to an exclusive contract in 1904) and its label. Only in passing does Suisman note that Victor’s elite Red Seal imprint was considerably outsold by its more pedestrian ­labels—whose catalogues ­included Tin Pan Alley’s plentiful ­offerings—­and that Caruso made most of his fortune singing to the public, not recording for ­it.

As new technology makes the possession of songs ever more transitory, not to mention functionally free, working musicians are turning again to live performance as their principal income source. And ­consumers—­some of whom have owned Beatles songs on 45s, ­eight-­tracks, LPs, and CDs, and now as MP3 files and cell phone ­ringtones—­are still mulling the costs and benefits of technology in delivering music to their ­ears.

 was the founding coeditor and the art director of

Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music

 by David Suisman, Harvard University Press, 356 pp, 2009.

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The commercial revolution in American music.

Changing Tunes

If you own a computer, you ­are—­by ­default—­a graphic de­signer. At your fingertips is software that makes it possible to design newsetters and invoices and bake sale posters, no formal training or special gifts required. Just as the do-it-yourself ethos of punk music taught many of us who keep a guitar in the closet that we 

be in bands, it also revealed the importance of actually having something to say, and the skill to say it in a compelling fashion. The democratization of computer-assisted design has illuminated a similar schism, evident whenever we walk past a wall of amateur ­wheat-­pasted posters. Only a very small number of designers become superstars and change, however briefly, the shared language of our ­culture.

That shared visual language is one reason design matters, and why the study of its history is relevant beyond Madison Avenue. Johanna Drucker, a professor of media studies and English at the University of Virginia, and Emily McVarish, an assistant professor of graphic design at California College of the Arts, have written and curated a history of commercial visual discourse that runs from 35,000 bc, when people drew on cave walls, to the present. Or almost to the present—the authors hardly mention Web design.

Graphic design has long been pulled between two impulses: purely decorative (it looks pretty and pleases the client) and ­context ­driven (it looks pretty, pleases the client, and echoes some relevant visual from the past to convey its message). Unlike most design books, this volume focuses not on large, pretty pictures (which designers page through looking for solutions to problems), but on the history and context of those images, addressing the social and artistic implications of changing technologies and the major design schools and movements that grew around them. (Design is typically viewed as the bastard child of fine art, as something an artist does to eat. That design is even being taught in the academy is progress.)

 is fundamentally and structurally a textbook, it omits footnotes and includes only a modest bibliography. Most of the printed pieces that are highlighted are reproduced as thumbnails, too small to be of great use to designers or to justify displaying the book on one’s coffee table. The authors’ ­20th-­century examples will seem fairly obvious to those in the field, particularly when compared to the striking ephemera assembled from earlier ­periods—­the handmade grandeur of a ­13th-­century illuminated manuscript, the formal elegance of a ­17th-­century sailing notice. Veteran designers will recognize, for example, the Stenberg brothers’ influential 1928 constructivist poster in which a collage is worked into a worker’s eyeglasses, George Lois’s 1965 

 cover, or Jamie Reid’s ­ransom-­note typography on the cover of the Sex Pistols’ 1977 album 

 is not a critical consideration of the field; there is simply too much ground to cover to do much more than name names. Drucker and McVarish’s selections suggest an underlying interest in creating or reinforcing a canon that focuses on the best and the ­best ­known. This is, after all, an introduction. What is left out, though, is sometimes curious. With the exception of the Russian constructivists, this history is limited, once we reach the 19th century, to Western European and U.S. traditions, leaving out the influential designs of Asia, except as they were interpreted in the West, and presuming that nothing of interest happened in Africa or South America, or even Australia or Mexico. Another glaring omission is the ordinary work of ordinary designers (the cover bands of advertising, if you will); there is no discussion of signage or sign painting, and hardly a mention of ­billboards.

All that said, textbooks offer entry points to broader and deeper discussions. Generations of guitarists heard first the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, then worked backward to Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, discovering the sources of what they initially admired. Today we are overwhelmed with carefully crafted visuals, on PDAs and computer screens and newsstands. This volume helps us to understand what they mean and where they came ­from.

magazine. He lives in Morehead, Kentucky.

Graphic! Design History: A Critical Guide

 by Johanna Drucker and Emiliy McVarish, Pearson/Prentice Hall, 386 pp, 2008.

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Grant Alden ultimately applauds a book that helps us understand something about the carefully crafted visuals that have become so much a part of our shared culture.