From Wikipedia:

3000 Years of Fantasy and Science Fiction is an anthology of fantasy and science fiction short stories, edited by American writers L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine Crook de Camp. […] The book collects eleven tales by various authors, with a foreword by Isaac Asimov and an overall introduction by the de Camps.

The first-edition jacket by Lothrop, Lee & Shepard features works by two outstanding artists who have left us in recent years.

The illustration is by Emanuel “Manny” Schongut. Born in New York in 1936, Schongut studied at Pratt Institute, majoring in graphic arts and illustration. In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked as a freelance illustrator in New York City, designing book covers for publishers like Harper & Row, Doubleday, and Random House. You can learn more about him and his works in an interview conducted by Joachim Boaz in 2016. Emanuel Schongut died in December 2022.

The typeface is Fat Albert. The squarish sans – here seen in its Shadow style – is an early design by Ray Cruz. Born in 1943 in Puerto Rico, Cruz graduated from New York City’s High School of Art and Design and embarked on a long and fruitful career as lettering artist and type designer. Fat Albert was made around 1970 while working at John N. Schaedler. Like Schongut, he designed numerous book covers for publishing houses in New York, such as Knopf, Simon & Schuster, Schocken, and Delacorte Press. In 2004, he himself digitized all three styles of his Fat Albert for a re-release with Bitstream. Ray Cruz passed away in March 2025.

[More info on ISFDB]

Hermann Zapf’s Melior in its schmalfett style, used for the cover of a sociology book by Warren G. Bennis (1925–2014) and Philip E. Slater (1927–2013), published by Harper & Row in their Colophon Books imprint. The design including the illustration is by Emanuel Schongut (1936–2022).

Book jacket for Felix Sutton’s The Big Show. A History of the Circus, with an introduction by Bill Doll, published by Doubleday in 1971.

Design and illustration by Emanuel Schongut, who stated that this is one of his favorite covers. On the front, he shows a harlequin with a dog doing tricks, alongside a parade of elephants. The spine has a different whiteface clown. The back isn’t half bad either, featuring a spectacular jumping tiger with tamer, next to a lion and a number of rising horses in silhouette. For the typography, Schongut paired two typefaces that are traditionally associated with the world of circus, both by use and by name, but avoided a direct LTypI: “The Big Show” is set in Circus. All other text uses P.T. Barnum.

Emanuel Schongut. License: All Rights Reserved.

Book jacket for Stranger to Town, a detective story by British novelist L.P. Davies (1914–1988), published in 1969 in Doubleday’s Crime Club imprint.

Julian Midwinter, a stranger to Harmsley Cosset, seems to know a great deal about the town and the victim of an auto accident. When he steps into the victim’s shoes, taking over his business and the same habits, he begins to have accidents. When he realizes the accidents were planned, he’s determined to find the murderer.

The jacket illustration and design is by Emanuel Schongut, who comments:

L.P. Davies was my favorite author to do covers for. His books always had a lovely sort of creepiness, crime, science fiction, fantasy, or a mixture of all. In this book the murder weapon was an award trophy.

For the typeface, Schongut chose Phoebus, one of the earliest typeface designs by Adrian Frutiger, originally released as foundry type by Deberny & Peignot in 1953. The shadow-only letterforms here take on an ominous look. In the monograph edited by Heidrun Osterer and Philipp Stamm, Frutiger comments on the design:

I started to sketch a titling face with deep shadows, but it looked somewhat banal standing straight up, so I tried an italic. The typeface gained a lot in dynamic thanks to the slanting character shapes against the slant of the deep shadows. I saw the letter shapes in my inner eye and sketched those deep shadows directly, off the cuff. It worked – a larger shadow would have been too bulky, anything thinner and the letters wouldn’t have stood out enough. It was really a matter of feeling, of intuition. It was clear that it had to be with serifs, and equally that it was to be a Latin-style typeface, serifs slanting right at the bottom and left at the top. The capital I for example would collapse without the little triangle at the top. Phoebus, being without contours and whose shapes are completed by the eye itself, was quite to [Charles] Peignot’s taste. He liked the fact that the typeface was entirely composed of shadows and seemed somehow to hover in the air.

The first edition of The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. (1923–2002) was published by Doubleday Science Fiction in 1968. The book jacket was designed and illustrated by Emanuel Schongut who was born on this day in 1936. Happy 85th birthday, Manny!

[More info on ISFDB]

Detail.

Book jacket for the first U.S. edition of Sweetcrab by Margaret Summerton, published for the Crime Club by Doubleday & Company in 1971. The design is by Emanuel Schongut, with a watercolor illustration featuring the English mansion after which the book is named.

The letterforms used for the title go back to an untitled capital alphabet depicted in the second edition of Strong’s Book of Designs (1917). Emanuel doesn’t remember where the letters came from. He recounts: “I may have ordered them from a printer, type house after seeing them in a catalog or cobbled them together from an old 1930s type design book I have. […] [T]he illustration was the important thing to me, the lettering secondary. It had to fit the feeling of the illustration and composition.” Chances are we’re looking at Martin Caps, a phototype adaptation shown in a Lettergraphics catalog from 1968. By now, the design has been digitized more than once.

The author’s name is in L&C Hairline, designed by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase around 1965. The ultralight geometric sans came with a large number of alternates.

On the back flap, the jacket typography is credited to Cheryl Brown. The blurb and the author biography are set in Caledonia.

This edition of The Sad, Sudden Death of My Fair Lady was published in Doubleday’s Crime Club Selection in 1971. The book jacket was designed and illustrated by Emanuel Schongut. The title typeface is Bauhaus Prisma H, one of the 16+6 variants from Photo-Lettering’s multiline series. The author’s name is in a light weight of Bauhaus Geometric (1970), a precursor to Benguiat’s ITC Bauhaus (1975).

Detail of the typography

Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, 1977

The Burglar books are a series of comic mystery novels written by Lawrence Block (b. 1938). The protagonist is Bernie Rhodenbarr,

a New York City-based thief who excels in lock picking and breaking and entering, and who is addicted to the thrill it provides. He served time in prison in his youth, and since then has resolved to avoid getting caught again.

Emanuel Schongut did the illustrations for the book jackets of the first four titles. They were published by Random House between 1977 and 1980. Schongut provided the illustration leaving space for the type. Dick Adelson, the art director, then added the typography.

For the first two books, Adelson used Plaza Ultra, center-aligned, stacked, and interlocked, in tightly spaced caps with enlarged swash forms inserted for the first and final letters (see EndcapS). Plaza was drawn by Alan Meeks and issued by Letraset in 1975 (originally under the name Playboy, until Hugh Hefner threatened to sue). The smaller lines are set in ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

This layout was revised for The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (1979). The author’s name was moved to the top, and Plaza made way for Wexford. This face is likewise a geometric display sans with Art Deco vibes (see e.g. the round-top A) Designed by Richard A. Schlatter, Wexford was released by VGC in 1972.

The Burglar in the Closet (1978)

The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (1979)

The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza (1980)

Island, 1972

Two paperback book covers designed and illustrated by Emanuel Schongut, and published in Harper and Row’s Perennial Classic series in 1972.

The typeface is Nubian, a nowadays seldom seen Fat Face with broad proportions. Designed by Willard T. Sniffin, it was first cast by American Type Founders in 1928. Nubian has very short serifs. In place of seriffed or ball terminals, several of its letterforms feature gently flared stroke endings, see e.g. S. Among its hallmark characters are i and j with half-circle dots as well as a curtailed g – neither of which is included on the covers shown here.

In the early 1970s, Nubian was available from Photo-Lettering, Inc., under its original name. Today there are several digital versions, including OPTI Nubian Foundry (Castcraft, 1990–1991), Noble (FontBank, 1992), Nubian (Dieter Steffmann, 1999), and Fansler (Walden Font Co., 2013).

Ape and Essence was first published in 1948. Island is Aldous Huxley’s final book, originally published in 1962. Aldous Huxley who was born on this day in 1894, 125 years ago.

Ape and Essence, 1972