Paul Bacon (designer)

Paul Bacon (December 25, 1923 – June 8, 2015) was an American book and album cover designer and jazz musician. He is known for introducing the "Big Book Look" in book jacket design, and designed about 6,500 jackets and more than 200 jazz record covers.

Paul Bacon was born December 25, 1923, in Ossining, New York. Bacon's family lived in many places in the New York City area while he was growing up due to economic hardships caused by the Great Depression. The family settled in Newark, New Jersey in 1939, where Bacon graduated from Newark Arts High School in 1940. Bacon's introduction to jazz was through the radio. "My brother and I realized we were jazz fans after hearing Benny Goodman on the Camel Caravan show in 1935," Bacon said. In Newark they were members of a "hot club," a group of teens who listened to and talked about jazz.

After high school, Bacon took a design job with Scheck Advertising, a small ad agency in Newark. He was drafted in 1943 and joined the Marine Corps. With the Marines he was sent to Guadalcanal, Guam, and China, never seeing any action.

He was discharged in 1946 and returned to Union Beach, New Jersey, where his family had moved. Shortly afterward he moved to New York City. He later married his roommate's cousin, Maxine Shirey, a dancer in Charles Weidman's house company for the City Center Opera in New York. Bacon died on June 8, 2015, aged 91, in Beacon, New York .

Bacon's design career got its start with drawings for small magazines such as The Newark Hot Club's Jazz Notes and Bob Thiele's Jazz before he was drafted into the Marines. After the war he worked for Hal Zamboni at his design studio, Zamboni Associates, in Manhattan, for about nine years. In addition to this $30 a week work, Bacon designed 10" album covers for Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff's label, Blue Note Records, and wrote reviews for The Record Changer, a magazine edited by Bill Grauer and Orrin Keepnews.

Bacon became the chief designer for Grauer and Keepnews's label, Riverside Records, in its early and middle years. At the same time he designed covers for the partner's reissues for RCA's new label, "X". It was also during this time – the late 40's and early 50's – in which Bacon began to work in book design.

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