A 52-Year-Long Led Zeppelin Mystery Was Just Solved

A researcher made the discovery in a Victorian-era photo album.

By Ashley Turner

A minor mystery about a Led Zeppelin album cover has finally been resolved. Led Zeppelin released its fourth studio album on Nov. 8, 1971, which is untitled but commonly referred to as Led Zeppelin IV. Among the album's greatest hits is "Stairway to Heaven," while the wordless cover shows a bearded man carrying a large bundle of sticks in front of a decaying wall.

Almost 52 years after it was released, unsolved questions regarding the cover have been answered, reported The New York Times. This image has been referred to as a painting, but it is actually a photograph of a man from the Victorian era who made thatched roofs for cottages in Wiltshire, a rural county in Southern England. It turns out that the man, Lot Long, was 69 years old when the photo was taken, according to Brian Edwards, the researcher who discovered the picture.

A visiting research fellow at the University of the West of England, Edwards stumbled upon the picture in March when browsing the internet for recent auction releases he thought might be useful for his research. Edwards noticed a photo he had seemingly seen before while looking through a Victorian photo album.

"There was something familiar about it straight away," he told the publication. In the year the album was released, Edwards obtained a "Led Zeppelin IV" LP, which he still listens to, though on a CD. Upon consulting his wife for a "sanity check," he determined the image was indeed from the cover of one of the most amazing albums he had ever heard. He notified the Wiltshire Museum, where he curated an exhibit in 2021.

The price the museum paid for the photo album was 420 pounds ($515) according to the auctioneer's website. The first page of the photo album states, "Reminiscences of a visit to Shaftesbury," and is marked as "a present to Auntie from Ernest."

Using that information, Edwards researched the origins of the photo album and identified the photographer as Ernest Howard Farmer. "It sounds like good detective work, but in truth there was a lot of luck involved," Mr. Edwards told The New York Times. "I caught a few good breaks."

How did that photo become the album cover? During a visit to an antique shop in Pangbourne, a village about 50 miles west of London along the River Thames, Robert Plant and his bandmate Jimmy Page spied the colorized version of the photo, according to the outlet.

It is plausible that Farmer used the picture to teach colorizing to his students because he was also a teacher, Edwards said. It appears that the colorized version of the picture has been lost since it might have ended up in a frame in an antique shop.

Wiltshire Museum, where the photos will be displayed, said the album includes about 100 photos of architectural views, street scenes, and portraits of rural workers."We will show how Farmer captured the spirit of people, villages, and landscapes of Wiltshire and Dorset, an adjoining county, that were so much of a contrast to his life in London," according to the museum in an announcement regarding the exhibition.

"Even if this Led Zeppelin photograph wasn't in there, this would be a very interesting exhibition about the quality of Victorian photographs," Edwards said.

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