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When the great pop artist, Andy Warhol, first came to New York in 1949, he had to scuffle for work just like all the other newcomers to town. He paid the bills as a graphic designer, and in the process, created some of the most iconic record labels of his time:

Who knew that Warhol, the pioneer of Pop Art, drew more than 50 album covers over the span of his career -- and not just for rock, but for classical music, opera and jazz?

But it's an obscure fact that this trajectory began with album covers. When Warhol came to New York in 1949, fresh out of art school, the long-playing record had just recently hit the marketplace. Warhol called the big labels, offering to illustrate their covers.

He won an assignment right away, from Columbia Records, for an LP called "A Program of Mexican Music." His drawings, of ancient drummers and dancers, were crude, but already they anticipated signature aspects of his later works.

He copied the figures from 16th-century Aztec sketches that he found in a Museum of Modern Art catalog, a forerunner of his tendency to make art from existing images, like the Marilyn Monroe photos and Campbell's Soup cans. And he used a technique known as "blotted-line" drawing, a basic form of printmaking that foretold his fascination with silk-screens.

No one really knew about this part of Warhol's career until recently, when Paul Marechal came along, and because of his fastidious research, we now have this wonderful book:

These works are the subject of a lavishly illustrated, fastidiously documented book, "Andy Warhol: The Record Covers, 1949-1987," published jointly by Prestel and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The author, Paul Marechal, is curator of the art collection at the Power Corporation of Canada, which consists mainly of French decorative art of the 18th and 19th centuries.

But he has long had a penchant for Warhol, and one day in 1996, while flipping through the bins at a record store in Montreal, he saw Paul Anka's 1976 album "The Painter," and that stopped him short. The cover was clearly designed by Warhol. It had the same look as his celebrity portraits, which he did for hefty commissions, by taking a Polaroid photo, enlarging it into a screen print, then painting it over with scribbly lines and pastel colors.

Mr. Marechal called the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to ask if there was more where that came from. The archivist Matt Wrbican sent him the titles of 23 albums whose covers Warhol was known to have designed. (They had been found in the artist's vast trove of possessions, which the museum was cataloging.)

Mr. Maraechal spent the next 12 years hunting down all the record covers that Andy designed. Yet, after the book came out, the discoveries were still coming in:

Since the book was published, collectors in Europe have sent him two more, including a 1984 album by the Swedish band Rat Fab; the father of one of the band members had known Warhol in the '60s and paid him to design the cover for his son.

His contribution to the jazz idiom includes the two covers below:

Warhol's cover for the jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell's self-titled debut album on the Blue Note label, in 1956, was a drawing based on a photograph, as were many of Warhol's later portraits. It was stylized, exaggerating the curves of Mr. Burrell's guitar, the vibrations of its strings and the strumming of his fingers.

The following year, on another Blue Note album cover, the saxophonist Johnny Griffin's "Congregation," Warhol -- again working from a photo -- painted fragments of colored flowers on Griffin's shirt, which not only imbued the drawing with a splashy rhythm but also foreshadowed the giant flowers that Warhol would paint, over and over, in the following decade.

It's nice to see these icons of the jazz world receive such special treatment at the pen of one of the great pop artists of all time!

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