No. 3, “Goldminen und Gorillas” / “Der Käfig”, 1982 (© Franquin / S.E.P.P., 1973, 1977)

This series of comic albums with German translations of the adventures of Spirou & Fantasio – with art by André Franquin – were published by Semic starting in 1982. The Spirou title and the album number are in Filmotype Vim, an open and shaded variant of Accent. The episode titles are added in Churchward Brush, often set on an angle.

No. 2, “Ein eisgekühlter Gast taut auf”, 1982. Reprints from Les Aventures de Spirou et Fantasio (Dupuis, 1950 series) #13; Le Voyageur du Mésozoïque (1960)

No. 5, “Auf dem Rummelplatz geht’s rund” / “Ferienfahrt mit Hindernissen”, 1982 (© Franquin / S.E.P.P., 1973, 1977)

No. 6, “Der Liliput-Trick” / “Des Wahnsinns fette Beute”, 1983 (© Franquin / S.E.P.P., 1977)

No. 7, “Tiefenrausch”, 1983 (© Franquin / S.E.P.P., 1977)

June 2014

Stadt Wolfen was one of the showpieces of the late GDR years. Located in the middle of a prefabricated housing estate, it remained popular as a restaurant and discotheque after the German reunification. There’s a community of fans who reminisce “the hottest parties” that went down at StaWo / Time Discoland from 1992 to 2002. Wolfen and the Bitterfeld region suffered from deindustrialization and depopulation. After standing vacant for a long time, the decaying building is set to be demolished.

What’s still left are the signs in the Ultra Bold Italic style of Churchward Design. The geometric letterfroms of the once trendy sans were drawn at the other end of the globe, by Samoan New Zealand designer Joseph Churchward (1932–2013). 

In July 2009, the building housed a döner joint (with signs in Arnold Böcklin). The “Treffpunkt Wolfen” sign had white letters.

Fonts from the Flea Market 1401

German picture sleeve for a single by Golden Earring, with two songs from their 1972 album Together. A year later, the rock band from The Hague would achieve worldwide fame with “Radar Love”. Founded in 1961 as The Tornados, the band is scheduled to play a series of five farewell concerts at the Rotterdam Ahoy in 2026.

[More info on Discogs]

This purely typographic sleeve features letterforms drawn by four masters of 1970s display type: “Tommy Brown” is Design Sparkly, a thick-thin-thin multline variant of Churchward Design by Joseph Churchward. The song title is set in all-lowercase Motter Ombra by Othmar Motter. Last but not least, the sans in the middle is ITC Avant Garde Gothic by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase.

[More info on Discogs]

“Popalp” is a piece of 1970s Swiss pop oddity produced by Michel Neuville and performed by Hermann Studer and his ensemble of alphorn players. The cover for the French release on the Seabird label depicts the Alps, but avoids the stereotypical choice of Helvetica and instead features Marianna. The balloon-like face by Samoan New Zealand designer Joseph Churchward was available in France from Hollenstein Phototypo.

[More info on Discogs]

Theatrical poster for Bugonia

For Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film, Bugonia, the Greek director has teamed up again with longterm graphic designer Vasilis Marmatakis, At the center of the marketing campaign for the film is a weird geometric typeface called Churchward Roundsquare. The font is one of many designed by New Zealand graphic designer Joseph Churchward (1933–2013), founder of Churchward Type. His biography can be found in the Encyclopedia of New Zealand:

Samoan-born graphic designer Joseph Churchward was an internationally renowned typeface designer whose work graced record covers, billboards, newspapers and popular literature such as posters and brochures around the world, both during his lifetime and beyond. He hand-created around 700 typefaces, drawing upon influences from his Pacific heritage and family. His work was well known to the international design community from the 1960s but was not prominent in New Zealand until Te Papa Tongarewa acquired his archive and held an exhibition of his work in 2009.

In the context of Bugonia, Vasilis Marmatakis uses the typeface in quite a jarring manner. In the trailer for example, Marmatakis disturbs the naturally flowy Adobe Garamond Bold Italic for the credits, choosing to interrupt them halfway through with the harsh, sharp edges of a single letter of Churchward Roundsquare. The end result is jarring and off putting, a perfect tonal fit for the film work of Yorgos Lanthimos.

Churchward Roundsquare print negative, from the Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa Tongarewa)’s Pacific Cultures Collection.

Emma Stone credit, from the trailer

Jesse Plemons credit, from the trailer

Yorgos Lanthimos credit, from the trailer

From Wikipedia:

El Ídolo de Mexico is an album by Mexican singer Vicente Fernández, released in 1974 by CBS. In 2015, it was selected by Billboard magazine as one of the “50 Essential Latin Albums of the Last 50 Years”.

[More info on Discogs]

Матадор (Matador) is a Russian TV show about modern culture that ran from 1991 to 1995. From Wikipedia (translated from the Russian):

The first episode of Konstantin Ernst’s artistic and journalistic cultural television program Matador was aired on January 5, 1991 – it was a program dedicated primarily to cinema, as well as culture, music, fashion, advertising, significant events and creative people. The topics of the episodes included the Venice Film Festival, Paris Haute Couture Week, the filming of the film Apocalypse Now, the life and work of couturier Paco Rabanne, the creator of Benetton advertising campaigns Oliviero Toscani, singer Serge Gainsbourg, film actress Marilyn Monroe, and directors Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

The logo is in a Cyrillic version of Bramley, with seriously squoosed letterforms. Titles use a wide variety of fonts.

Belwe for Стивен Содерберг (Steven Soderbergh)

Karnac

Bramley

Bookman

Stencil

Mistral

Oakwood

Palatino in italic caps

Published by Gyldendal in 1972, Hare, hvorhen? (“Rabbit, where to?”) is the Norwegian edition of John Updike’s 1971 novel Rabbit Redux. It’s the follow-up to Rabbit, Run (1960), known in Norwegian as Hare, hopp!

The cover design by Peter Haars brings together two display faces from 1969 which both carry first names starting with M: while the multiline Michel is named after its designer, Michel Waxmann, the inflated Marianna by Joseph Churchward got its name from one of the designer’s daughters. The author’s name is in ITC Pioneer.

French sleeve for Yoko Ono’s first single from her second studio album Fly, released in 1971 by Pathé Marconi Records under license from Apple Records.

Written and sung by Ono, the A-side was recorded with John Lennon on piano and organ and Klaus Voormann on acoustic guitar and bass.

From Wikipedia:

Ono biographers Nell Beram and Carolyn Boriss-Krimsky described the song’s theme as the way the public defined Ono solely as ex-Beatle John Lennon’s wife and did not recognize her as an artist in her own right. Beram and Boriss-Krimsky felt that the lack of promotion her records including Fly received was a reflection of this theme, since her record company did not believe that the public would be interested in Ono’s solo work Ben Urish and Ken Bielen described the song’s theme similarly, stating that it is an “ironic ballad” that it sounds like a love song, but the lyrics describe Ono’s anxiety about losing her identity.

Premier Lightline is a Letraset original, and the first typeface to be released in their Letragraphica range. Smoke and Churchward Marianna were available in France from Hollenstein at the time, see them listed in a 1971 catalog.

[More info on Discogs]

Fonts from the Flea Market #1348

A vertiginous sleeve for the German release of “Run, Baby Run (Back Into My Arms)”. Recorded by vocal trio the Newbeats from Shreveport, Louisiana, it was a #4 hit in Canada in 1965. When the song was re-released in 1971, it reached #10 in the U.K., following extensive playing in Northern Soul clubs in England. Roy Orbison recorded a version for his 1972 album, Memphis [Wikipedia].

The font in use is Churchward Design Bold, in all-lowercase characters. Drawn by Samoan New Zealand designer Joseph Churchward, it was available in Germany from Berthold Fototype.

[More info on Discogs]

To Studio Oeding, “eating good food at a reduced speed means enjoying it.” The Hamburg-based studio developed the brand concept, naming, packaging and logo for Slow Fast Food. The minimal design – just white type printed on transparent labels, attached to reusable glass jars – combines two typefaces: Futura underpins the graphic minimalism. Churchward Brush is used in its Italic style. Its task is to visualize the fast aspect.

Fonts from the Flea Market #1320

The chubby forms of Churchward Marianna make Star Wars look a lot less martial and dangerous. This audiobook with original music by John Williams was narrated by Dominique Paturel (1931–2022), who is best known as the French dubbing voice of Larry Hagman (as J.R. Ewing in Dallas) and Michael Caine. The 7″ record comes with a 24-page color booklet. It was released by Buena Vista Records in Canada in 1979 or 1980. Shown here is a slightly later French pressing.

[More info on Discogs]

CW. License: All Rights Reserved.

Just like the recently featured Begriffe-Lotto, Wir sammeln Pilze (“We gather mushrooms”) is a game issued around 1981 by VEB Plasticart Annaberg-Buchholz, produced in their Werk 4 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, the Saxon city nowadays known again as Chemnitz.

And just like Begriffe-Lotto with its mix of Cut-In and Thannhaeuser-Schrift, this board game illustrates the gamut of typographic options in East Germany at the time: body copy was to a large extent still set manually, with metal type dating back several decades, to be printed in letterpress.

Designers in the GDR strived for a greater palette. For display purposes, they found interesting contemporary faces in the offerings of the NSW, the “non-socialist economic area”, read: the capitalist West. In this case, it’s Marianna by Samoan New Zealand designer Joseph Churchward. The chubby face with forms evocative of curving mushroom heads (see also Bravado) was available from West German company Berthold Fototype and also from French press type manufacturer Mecanorma.

The insert with the rules of the game features a headline in Aktuell, created by Walther Schnippering and released by Schriftguss before the war, in 1935. The text face is the slightly younger Primus-Antiqua. Made in-house at VEB Typoart, apparently as a socialist clone of Excelsior (Linotype, 1931), it was first cast in 1950.

CW. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.ebay.de allyouneed0785. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.ebay.de olkrieg. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.ebay.de gonzostar-39. License: All Rights Reserved.

Fonts from the Flea Market #1274

Joseph Churchward designed the bubblegum face Marianna in 1969. In 1971, French Letraset competitor Mecanorma adopted it for dry transfer lettering. In the same year, it was used on the sleeve for the song “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Our Love”, in all caps with a gradient fill.

[More info on Discogs]

Four Beatles with sunglasses, with words set in an ultrageometric sans from New Zealand (Churchward Design, here probably Mecanorma’s version named Galaxy), and a display typeface of unclear provenance, both in all lowercase letters.

This face with the unusual weight distribution is shown as Santana in a Typeshop catalog from around 1977. It isn’t included in their 1973 catalog, though – nor in the 1974 catalog by Hollenstein, which would be an obvious source for wacky faces from that time and place. If you happen to know more about the origins of Santana, please let us know in a comment. [Mystery solved, see comments.]

Glyph set of Santana as shown in a Typeshop catalog from around 1977

“Transcend” is the second single by Berlin based solo artist TWÏNS on record label Earth Libraries from Birmingham, Alabama. It features “Ocean Flowers” as a B-side, while the title track is taken off their upcoming album The Human Jazz.

The artist name and title are set in Lucia Shadow, while the name in the label logo features Churchward Design Hairline. The photograph on the cover is by Neelam Khan Vela.

“Generic French Disco” (oopswhoops) packaged in a generic French Tricolore sleeve. The only release by Flipers was issued by EMI/Pathé Marconi in 1976.

The biline caps are from the No-End style that’s part of Joseph Churchward’s enormous Churchward Design family. They are paired with open and shaded caps from an unidentified bold condensed grotesque with round dots. Unfortunately, the two colors were printed with misaligned registration.

[More info on Discogs]

A shaded Tuscan and a futuristic sans, paired on a tape cassette insert by King Sonic, probably from the mid-1970s or 1980s. The former was available from Letraset as Quentin, and from Mecanorma as Gay Nineties. The latter is Churchward Design, which was also carried by Mecanorma as Churchward Galaxy. Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed – likewise included in the catalog of the French manufacturer of rub-down type – is used for the smaller “King Sonic” on the spine. The small print is set in the IBM Selectric version of Univers.

According to 45spaces, King Sonic was a brand from Hong Kong.

Via Bruce Jamieson’s collection of tape cassette inserts.

Two cassette inserts from different brands, but apparently by the same manufacturer. At least the virtually identical design and wording suggest as much. Both inserts have Churchward Design and Futura. The one shown above additionally features ITC Busorama for “International” (with both its left- and right-leaning A).

45spaces lists International (ITN) as a brand from Hong Kong. Their ITN logo with concentric squares is a riff on the classic BASF logo with concentric circles.

Via Bruce Jamieson’s collection of tape cassette inserts.