India, Aug. 21 -- In a flat in Manchester in January 1980, Ian Curtis (yes, that Ian Curtis, a few months from becoming post-punk's most mourned voice at 23) of the band Joy Division sat gluing coarse sandpaper onto record covers.

What he and a few others were building, sheet by sheet, was an audacious prank / experiment by the music label Factory Records: the sleeve for The Return of the Durutti Column, the debut album of the band of that name.

The Durutti Column was, at the time, essentially made up of one shy, depressed guitarist named Vini Reilly. The idea for the sandpaper came from label co-founder Tony Wilson, inspired by a prank / artistic statement from decades earlier: a 1959 book by French philosopher Guy Debord that was boun...