I’ve previously posted the cover of Grosset & Dunlap’s paperback edition of this cookbook, featuring West Fantini. This is the first edition published by David White in hardback three years earlier, in 1969. The cover was likewise designed by Loretta Trezzo.

The title typeface again is by Photo-Lettering. This time it’s Benguiat Montage, and probably its Extra Condensed width. A comparison to the digital version by House Industries reveals various differences, see below. This is because that is more of a revision and refinement than a 100% faithful digitization. Looking at period specimens shows that Benguiat’s original from the 1960s did have that wide f and that big fat ball terminal on r. For all I know, Montage never offered an alternate form for the letter k, neither then or now. I’ll have to assume that the form with curved leg was a customization, made by the PLINC staff just for this job.

For “The”, Trezzo used the catchword included in Bookman. Wooding’s name and the description are set in what looks like Torino Italic.

The title on the book cover (top) compared to a resetting in the digital Montage by House Industries

Six Weeks is a 1976 novel by Fred Mustard Stewart (1932–2007). In 1982, it was adapted for the screen, starring Dudley Moore, Mary Tyler Moore, and Katherine Healy.

The dust jacket for the book’s first edition by Arbor House was designed by Loretta Trezzo. The New York-based designer worked with a typeface designed by her local colleague Ursula Suess, Book Jacket. The title demonstrates how well Book Jacket performs in all-caps settings – something that can’t be said of every calligraphic italic. The author’s name has alternate swash forms for all three initials.

Here’s one for Javi, who’s fond of West Fantini.

Dave West’s slick standalone italic with swashy caps was used for the cover of The Leftovers Cookbook. First published in 1969 by David White, this is Grosset & Dunlap’s abridged paperback edition from 1972. It has the same cover illustration by Loretta Trezzo, who also might have done the typography.

Source: www.abebooks.com Bookfever. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.abebooks.com The Old Mill Bookshop. License: All Rights Reserved.

Harrington was first cast by John Haddon & Co. in London in 1899. There was at least one phototype revival in the 1960s, by Lettergraphics. But it wasn’t until 1978 that the turn-of-the-century design became popular again: that year, it was added to Letraset’s Letragraphica range.

Here it can seen used with the overly tight spacing that is so typical for the time, on the jacket for Darlin’ Bill, a book by Jerome Charyn (b. 1937) published by Arbor House in 1980. This “love story of the Wild West featuring Will Bill Hickok and one Sally Ovenshine” is described as “a blending of fact and fiction, adventure and romance.”

Designer Loretta Trezzo paired Harrington with two other faces rooted in the Art Nouveau era: Roberta III Initials (or maybe PLINC’s virtually identical precursor, Staudel Xenotype J) and Herkules.

Source: archive.org ⁄. License: All Rights Reserved.

The title page features Ampurias, a VGC original for which we don’t know the designer yet. The subtitle and the titles of the other books by Jerome Charyn are set in Electra Italic.

In my previous post, I showed how Loretta Trezzo customized Cortez for a book by Robert Silverberg published in 1983. Two years later, the New York-based designer worked on a related job, the dust jacket for Silverberg’s post-apocalyptic novel Tom O’Bedlam.

This book was issued by a different publisher, Donald I. Fine, not Arbor House. Still, Trezzo used the same basic layout, with an illustration in the lower half against a gradient background, and a type treatment that again shows the author’s name and the title in big white letters, complete with the hyper-extended glyphs for R and t, set center-aligned, and separated by a smaller line in Helvetica Condensed.

This time, though, she opted for “Cortez Sans”. Letraset’s Cortez came in a single style; there was no sans-serif variant. The jacket designer made this modification herself, by chopping off the “Latin” triangular serifs. That’s pretty much the same technique used in the 19th century to produce some of the earliest sans-serif typefaces, see figure 25 in Pierre Pané-Farré’s article for Forgotten Shapes. Consequently, the result looks equally wonky, especially for glyphs like S and e.

I wonder if this was Trezzo’s own idea, or whether it was a request by the publisher (“nice, but can you make it sans?”). Maybe the inspiration came from the design of the interior – the title page (shown at the end of this post) features ITC Grizzly, which is a sans of similar weight and geometric build, with forms for R, S, a and, most strikingly, g that are akin to the custom “Cortez Sans”. Or was it the other way around, and the (uncredited) interior designer tried to approximate the jacket typography?

The jacket typography compared to a quick-and-dirty resetting using Copernicus, URW’s digitization of Cortez, with the alternate R and t, adjusted spacing, and baseline shift for t and g. Once one looks closer, it becomes clear that Trezzo did more than just cutting off serifs: R and S were enlarged and terminals straightened, among other small adjustments.

The title page uses ITC Grizzly.

First edition of Valentine Pontifex, the third book in Robert Silverberg’s Majipoor series, published in 1983 by Arbor House.

The jacket design is by Loretta Trezzo who used Cortez as the display typeface. Philip Kelly’s geometric Latin was released in 1977 in Letraset’s Letragraphica range. Trezzo inserted some of the included descending alternates, for R, n, t and f, but didn’t stop there: she also gave P and the final x such hyper-extended strokes that reach below the baseline, the latter apparently repurposed from k. The big triangles on i were replaced with round dots – which don’t get in the way in the tightly spaced setting. Last but not least, v and V acquired wedge-shaped base serifs, maybe to better harmonize these glyphs with S and P, and to optimize the typographic color.

[More info on ISFDB]

The Eye of the Queen is the debut novel by science fiction writer Phillip Mann (1942–2022). First published by Gollancz in the UK in 1982, this is the book jacket for the first American edition, by Arbor House in 1983.

Once more, Loretta Trezzo demonstrates her skills both in illustration and typography. The enigmatic image depicts a hand in the sky, floating above or emerging from a volcano, with an eyeless human head lying in the foreground. The title is presented in Countdown, with condensed proportions, custom small caps, and a hyper-extended Q tail. A spur was added to N, for better legibility. Mann’s name is set in caps from Harry.

[More info on ISFDB]

The Cut-In typeface comes with a number of alternate glyphs. For Loretta Trezzo, the stylistic range wasn’t large enough, though. The NYC-based book jacket designer made an ingenious discovery: ITC Benguiat Gothic is another monolinear typeface with rounded terminals, and its weight and proportion match those of Cut-In.

For The Leeshore, Trezzo mixed letterforms from both typefaces. “THE” is in ITC Benguiat Gothic (1979), Ed Benguiat’s contrastless sans-serif adaptation of his famous ITC Benguiat (1978). In “LEESHORE”, most glyphs stem from Cut-In (c. 1973), the futuristic geometric sans designed by Maurice Schlesinger. The high-waisted R with the curved leg, however, is taken from Benguiat Gothic, readily identifiable by its Art Nouveau roots. (The H is customized, O appears to be a repurposed zero.)

The author’s name is composed in a similar fashion: It’s in Cut-In, with interspersed E’s from Benguiat Gothic. The mixing is continued even for the small text in red. Both typefaces were available from Letraset at the time. Trezzo effectively uses the the two rub-down typefaces as complementing stylistic sets.

The Leeshore is the debut novel of Robert Reed. It was published by Donald I. Fine in 1987.

[More info on ISFDB]

The uppercase glyphs of Cut-In Medium (top) and ITC Benguiat Gothic, as shown in Letraset catalogs.

The title page used a typeface that is influenced by Herbert Bayer’s Universal-Alfabet (like Cut-In) and was designed by Ed Benguiat (like Benguiat Gothic): ITC Bauhaus.

The interior pages are set in Electra by William Addison Dwiggins. Roman numerals mark the beginnings of each chapter. No designer is credited for the book interior.

ITC Benguiat used by Loretta Trezzo for the first-edition jacket design for Robert Silverberg’s World of a Thousand Colors, published in 1982 by Arbor House, New York. Trezzo used the Condensed Bold style from Ed Benguiat’s eponymous typeface family. The author’s name is shown in all caps with enlarged initials.

Embarked on an interstellar voyage, a mixed crew enters into spaces and worlds, both outer and inner, never hinted at but holding perils and beauties.

[More info on ISFDB]

Book jacket for the first edition of Star of Gypsies (1986), a novel by science fiction author Robert Silverberg (b. 1935).

In the year 3500, the Gypsy King tells the story of how his people regained their legendary position as royalty by conquering space and time through advanced interstellar wandering.

The design by Loretta Trezzo features Tintoretto with some modifications when compared to Schelter & Giesecke’s original as well as the Letraset revival: e and r were cropped, enabling a tighter letterspacing, and v was made narrower. The letter r lost its descender while f gained one. Both the f and the second t got a contextual alternate form with a two-sided crossbar. “Author of Tom O’Bedlan” is added in caps from ITC Avant Garde Gothic Condensed, with an alternate initial A.

[More info on ISFDB]

Title page ft. Friz Quadrata.

Eckmann caps paired with Zeal for a book cover designed by Loretta Trezzo. This paperback edition of Virginia Woolf’s famous novel from 1928 was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1973.

Zeal is a formal script made in the late 1950 at Filmotype. It was digitized by Mark Simonson and Charles Gibbons in 2012.

Bassani’s book was originally published in 1964 as Dietro La Porta. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver, this first American edition was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1972.

The dust jacket by Loretta Trezzo references the paintings by Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. The typeface is ITC Bernase Roman (1970), an interpretation of the genre known as De Vinne in the US and Romanisch/Romana in Germany. Like many other styles from the turn of the century, the genre regained popularity in the late 1960s/early 1970s, see e.g. Hawthorn (Letraset, 1968). The version by Ronné Bonder and Tom Carnase is distinguished by a peculiar monocular a (not used here) and a “laughing” e with diagonal bar (cf. Roxane Gataud’s Bely Display, 2016). Image Club made a digitization in 1992, but it’s neither complete nor well spaced, and seems to be no longer available. Benjamin Critton’s Nazareth (2016) is a mashup of ITC Bernase Roman and Trooper Roman, but unfortunately doesn’t acknowledge the sources.

An early use of Alan Meeks’ Plaza (Letraset, 1975), when it was still known as Playboy. Set on curves, with underlines and (customized) swash caps which have preserved only in Scangraphic’s digitization. Published in 1976 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York City.

Cook-In was conceived by Kathleen Dunning Fisher for her “two girls, Suzanne and Vicki”. Cover design and illustrations by Loretta Trezzo. Published by David White Inc., New York City, January 1969.

The title appear to be custom drawn, loosely modeled after Seymour Chwast’s Art Tone (1964). The author’s name in bottom-heavy caps with contour represents an early use of Photo-Letterings’s Village Stocked a.k.a. Psychedelitype 5785 (1968).

Title page