All right, so now you can take over and tell your part of the story of Prestige Records.

The Prestige album covers of the 1950s trace a breathtaking creative arc produced on a shoestring by a ragtag group of brilliant young artists.

This prodigious body of work is audacious, visionary, and resolutely modern.

As David Rosenthal points out, the years 1955 to 1965 represent the last period in which jazz effortlessly attracted the hippest young black musicians, the most musically advanced, those with the most solid technical skills and the strongest sense of themselves, not only as entertainers, but as artists.

This was equally true of the designers drawn to prestige, as the new medium of record packaging provided a unique opportunity to create a visual corollary to jazz.

At its best, the music and art achieved an extraordinary symbiosis.

The first purposeful steps in establishing a visual language for prestige came in 1953 with Leo Sharper's designs for, aptly, the two New Directions albums.

Why did you choose to include those process images?

But why don't you take us into the origin story of the book and why you wrote this?

Well, Chris and I have been friends for years.

He was into the music earlier than me definitely, but we had always sort of enjoyed not only the music together but the graphics together, and that was sort of from the start.

The way I met him was I was working at a design firm, and I had always heard about musicians like John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, and I decided one day, this is in the sort of crossover period between Cassettes and CDs going way back.

I'd bought a couple of jazz CDs, and I had them on my desk at this design firm.

And the business manager, who happened to be Chris' wife, walked by and said, "What do you got there?" And I said, "Well, these are just a couple of CDs that I just got." And on top was an Art Blakey CD, and she said, "You gotta meet my husband." And when somebody says that, you're sort of like, "Well, okay." And that was Friday, and, uh, I come in on Monday, and on my desk is a stack of four cassettes, each of which has a handmade four-panel fold-out piece of art with it, half photocopied, half hand-done.

It looked like the paper was ripped out of some accounting ledger somewhere.

Who are the characters that are creating these covers? Who are they? What's their background, and what do we know about them?