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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Two album cover proofs for Déjà Vu, circa 1970, 3 image 1
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Two album cover proofs for Déjà Vu, circa 1970, 3 image 2
Lot 17

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Two album cover proofs for Déjà Vu,
circa 1970, 3

20 – 30 June 2025, 12:00 PDT
Online, Los Angeles

US$2,000 - US$3,000

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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Two album cover proofs for Déjà Vu,

circa 1970,
comprising; a brown faux leather proof for the front and back cover, two trimmed corners to right margin; a sepia printer's proof for the inside cover, trim marks and code to upper right margin SD-7200; together with the Tom Gundelfinger photograph for the front cover on card, with printer labels to right and left margin, (sold without copyright),
outer cover 26 x 13 1/2in; inside 26 x 13in (2); photograph 9 1/2 x 7 1/2, (3)

Footnotes

Déjà Vu:
According to Gary Burden, the artwork for Déjà Vu came from Stephen Stills' love of elaborate old tintypes and family journals of the 1860s.

Originally, for Déjà Vu, the plan was to shoot an actual tintype photo with a tintype camera Burden had rented. In the end the photo was taken with a 35mm camera by Tom Gundelfinger, due to the impracticalities of the tintype camera. The prints still were made the old-fashioned way by coating the paper with emulsion in the darkroom, laying the negative over the coated paper and putting in the sun for various periods of time to bracket the exposure and letting the sun do the work. The finished product still has all of the intense energy one sees in a tintype with long exposure.

The next step was to design the package for the tintype photo that would be a leather wrapped tintype case, with gold foil stamped lettering and the tintype tipped on the leather cover. Burden found a paper mill in Georgia that made "beautiful paper that was almost leather in feel and had a great bumped up texture".

"The record company was not amused... and they called Stephen ranting and raving about the costs, he told them that they would make a lot of money on this album. He was right. It went platinum in weeks".
- Gary Burden

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