The Smoke Dreams is the debut album by Fred Engelberg, released in 1963 with Crestview Records. This record label was founded in the same year, as a subsidiary of Elektra. The cover was designed by William S. Harvey, Elektra’s influential art director who held this position from 1953 to 1973. He combined Barry Feinstein’s smoke photography with right-aligned Bulletin Typewriter, all in lowercase.
Engelberg’s ellipsis-heavy liner notes on the back are arranged in a wavy column of smoke, set in Memphis. The track list on the label shows W.A. Dwiggins’ Metro, while the Crestview wordmark is in a style known as French Antique Extended or Clarendon Extended.