Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk

First edition, second printing (1987) copy of Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk by Paul Grushkin. When Elvis and the rest rocked the mid 1950s, many predicted (and perhaps even more hoped) that rock 'n' roll would die in the cradle. It has, for a fact, gone beyond its thirtieth birthday now, and a great many people have grown up with it-three decades of the most intensely popular music the world has ever known, thirty years of memories and feelings. Three decades of sounds. And sights. Electric, outrageous, erotic, blatant, rebellious, vital. The adjectives that describe rock music also apply to the artwork created to celebrate and sell it. Originally intended merely as inexpensive promotional devices, rock posters evolved into extraordinary visual equivalents of the music they advertised: from the earliest Elvis Presley-funky bills nailed to telephone poles as if to announce a local boxing match-to the Grateful Dead-multichrome psychedelic hallucinations painstakingly rendered