Light On Dark Water

It is of course an LP cover from 1955, the music being a selection of what used to be called "light classics," played by the Columbia Symphony, the in-house orchestra of Columbia Records, and conducted by Artur Rodzinski. (I can't believe Columbia Records is no more.)

That's the graphic that accompanies the downloadable version of the album at eMusic. But now look at this photo of an actual copy of the LP.

It looks old-fashioned and all, but it doesn't have that unsettling and possibly sinister feel that the other one does. The difference seems to mainly be in the amount of red, which Lynch uses a lot. Red being normally a joyful high-spirited color, it's strange that Lynch makes such use of it, and to such weird effect. I think the word "lurid" applies. 

I suppose the eMusic version is a scan of a copy of the album. Or maybe the original graphics are still filed away at Sony, which bought Columbia, and it was scanned from one of those. I thought the brand, catalog, and other information had been edited out from a scan of the published cover, but maybe it's the other way around, and that first image is the artist's work, before the information was added. Either way, surely all that red is a product of the conversion to electronic form.