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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Three album cover proofs for Déjà Vu, circa 1970, 3 image 1
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Three album cover proofs for Déjà Vu, circa 1970, 3 image 2
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Three album cover proofs for Déjà Vu, circa 1970, 3 image 3
Lot 21

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

circa 1970,
comprising; a brown faux leather proof for the front and back covers, two trimmed corners; and two sepia printer's proofs, one used for inside cover, one image of the band with album credits to the lower right corner, both with trim marks,
approx. 6 x 13 1/2in (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 were made the old-fashioned way by coating the paper with emulsion in the darkroom, laying the negative over the coated paper and putting them in the sun for various periods 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".

Burden wrote; "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".

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