Paul Bacon (December 25, 1923 – June 8, 2015) was an American book and album cover designer and jazz musician.

Bacon's family lived in many places in the New York City area while he was growing up due to economic hardships caused by the Great Depression.

"My brother and I realized we were jazz fans after hearing Benny Goodman on the Camel Caravan show in 1935,"[1] Bacon said.

[2] After high school, Bacon took a design job with Scheck Advertising, a small ad agency in Newark.

He later married his roommate's cousin, Maxine Shirey, a dancer in Charles Weidman's house company for the City Center Opera in New York.

Bacon became the chief designer for Grauer and Keepnews's label, Riverside Records, in its early and middle years.

[2] The art director for E. P. Dutton, the book's publisher, was pleased enough to ask Bacon to provide a dust jacket as well.

[4] In the early 1950s, Bacon was commissioned by Tom Bevans, the art director of Simon & Schuster, to design a number of titles.

Instances of this "look" include Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Visions of Cody by Jack Kerouac, and Bullet Park by John Cheever, along with countless others.

In later years, while Bacon was officially retired from creating book jackets, he continued to work on special projects for the small publishing firm McPherson & Co., and he returned to designing jazz albums.

[2][5] He has performed in Japan, Australia, New England, and on many jazz cruises, booked by Hank O'Neil and Shelley Shier's agency, HOSS.