The Boss Music – Vol. 1 Kitten Kind album art

Louis XIV, a motorbike, and the sloping grandmother of Hobeaux Rococeaux? This unique combination made it into Jonny Trunk’s Top 10 selection from his Music Library, an anthology showcasing library music albums from around the world. From Wire:

It’s a French library LP, and belongs in a holding pen with a whole bunch of very small Paris based library companies that came and went very quickly in the mid-1970s. Everything about this image is wrong, which is why I put it on a tee shirt. The producer was JC Pierric (Real name JC Boinot), a man who tried all sorts of musical progressions for about a decade. To my knowledge, there is no Volume 2 for this. And incidentally, there is nothing about cats anywhere on this LP.

You can listen to one of the tracks on YouTube. The sleeve design is credited to Masq Atelier (Éditions musicales Masq). [Discogs]. An expanded edition of The Music Library was published in 2016 by Fuel.

The ornamented italic Tuscan used for “The Boss Music” presumably goes back to a 19th century design. It is shown in the Solotype catalog as Oliva and appears in Mecanorma’s Graphic Book #7 as 82B Lettres Ornées. In 1995, Alan Prescott digitized the set of caps as New Viola. I’d be curious to learn more about Oliva’s origins.