A young co-worker is incredulous at my purchase. “You bought a music CD?”  he exclaims.  “I can’t remember the last time I bought one. Listen, old-timer, it’s all about streaming now. No packaging, just the tunes!”

He is correct about the death of the compact disk. As music stores have closed, the CD is as plentiful as a cigarette vending machine or a coin-operated telephone. But he is wrong about the aversion to packaging. While the CD is nearing rigor mortis, the vinyl album has rebounded.  

For more than three years, sales of vinyl music albums have outsold those of compact discs, a trend that is especially common among millennials. Some of them will ascribe the popularity to the sound quality of record albums, but in truth I believe it is the packaging. The album cover and its accompanying liner notes can be a work of art. 

My co-worker will never appreciate the joy we baby-boomers had in analyzing the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper” album. It was a history lesson, a patchwork of the famous, the infamous, and the soon-to-be discovered. The album contained the group’s 16th number one single (“All You Need is Love”), but the cover was as discussed as the orchestral-added psychedelic music.

Who else had put out a cover with photos of W.C. Fields, Edgar Allen Poe, and Marlon Brando?  Was that Marilyn Monroe? (Yes). Then who was the other blonde bombshell? And was that Albert Einstein?

You needed an encyclopedia to appreciate all the personages on the cover. With streaming, all you get is a song and a debit.

And it wasn’t just that album. How many thousands of people have walked down tiny Jones Avenue dotted with slushy gutters and Greenwich Village brownstones, staring down and cuddling girlfriends, all in an effort to replicate the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”?...How many millions have asked passers-by to photograph them as they walked across Abbey Road? (One of the walkers must be barefoot tied to the rumor that Paul McCartney was dead)…How many women had posters from Donny Osmond album covers on their bedroom walls?...How many men had similar posters showing the Eagles dressed up as “Desperados”?...How about the talk when the Rolling Stones issued an album with a 3D cover? And there were the liner notes. One could read beat poets in early folk albums. We could read a rock-oriented “Rolling Stone” editor mesmerized by the bond between Waylon Jennings and Native Americans on the “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” album.

You could feel the personality of the artist from the cover design: The laidback wanderer outcast on Willie Nelson’s “Red-Headed Stranger,” the young wistful innocence of Simon and Garfunkel on the cover of “Sounds of Silence,” and the playful whimsy of Joni Mitchell on her self-painted album covers.

An album was a keepsake, not a fleeting moment on the Hot 100.  That’s why when you enter the growing number of used record stores, you find men and women 21-35 pawing through bins, forking over $30 for “very good” copies of classics that once cost $4.99 or new pressings of originals.  

The last time I visited a record store, a young man who looked like he still had homework and a curfew was shouting at a friend.

“Look what I found,” he exclaimed.  “It’s a used copy of the Kinks, and it has ‘A Well-Respected Man’ on it. I’ve been looking for this.”

I smiled and turned to him. “I’ve got that album,” I said. “I bought it new back in 1966.” The boy looked at me as if he was undergoing a religious experience and I was an apostle. λ