See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me (Again)

Once it was a cherished ritual: come home from the record store, tear off the cellophane, drop the needle, and lose your self in the artwork, the liner notes, the smell of the jacket’s freshly glued seams.

- Robert Baird

Okay, maybe the glue-sniffing thing was my own particular obsession, but anyone who’s ever bought and played new LPs remembers that the packaging was an integral part of the experience. Even the inner record sleeve was a canvas for artwork. Then there were the inserts and other assorted tchotchkes—posters, paper mustaches, and, in one case, a pair of ladies’ panties stretched across the record.

With CDs, the tactile side of enjoying an album was more or less lost. While CD booklets retained the artwork, albeit in miniature, it was never quite the same. One of the welcome side benefits of the return of vinyl has been the return of LP jackets, and no one does it better than Stoughton Printing Co., in the City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, just east of Los Angeles.