George Harrison commissioned Tom Wilkes to design a hinged box in which to house the three discs of his first solo album to be published after the Beatles’ break-up, All Things Must Pass (1970), rather than have them packaged in a triple gatefold cover. The packaging caused some confusion among retailers, who, at that time, associated boxed albums with opera or classical works.

The stark black-and-white cover photo was taken on the main lawn at Friar Park by Barry Feinstein. Commentators interpret the photograph — showing Harrison towering over four garden gnomes — as representing his removal from the Beatles’ collective identity. The gnomes had recently been delivered to Friar Park and placed on the lawn; seeing the four figures there, and mindful of the message in the album’s title, Feinstein immediately drew parallels with Harrison’s former band. Author and music journalist Mikal Gilmore has written that Lennon’s initial negativity regarding All Things Must Pass was possibly because he was “irritated” by this cover photo; Harrison biographer Elliot Huntley attributes this reaction to envy on Lennon’s part during a time when “everything [Harrison] touched turned to gold.”

Some of Feinstein’ photographs from that session appeared instead on the picture sleeves for the singles “My Sweet Lord” / “Isn’t It A Pity” and “What Is Life” / “Apple Scruffs”. Both the 33⅓ album and the 45rpm singles feature the Abbott Old Style typeface.

(Adaptation from Wikipedia)

This programme for festivities to accompany rowing races in Henley-on-Thames at the 1948 Olympics is mostly set in Granby, Stephenson Blake’s humanist sans. Released to compete with Gill Sans (which is used for the italic small matter), it’s very similar to Johnston, the metal type of which Stephenson Blake crafted. It’s not, though, simply a commercial release of Johnston - while it’s similarly quite monoline (see the ‘a’ and 't') and shares the diamond dots motif, details like the single-storey ‘g’ and Futura-ish 'R' are its own. Printed by the local printers Higgs & Co, who are still in business. A dinner invitation from the same week uses Gill Sans italics and a spindly Old Style, presumably Monotype's.

Images from the Thames River & Rowing Museum at Henley, whose John Piper collection is also worth a visit if you're in the area. They don't credit the invitation as also being printed by Higgs, but the colour of ink and style is very similar.

I’ve never been entirely clear what the deal with Granby was. It turns up every now and then in trade printing of its time I've seen, but far, far less than Gill Sans - so much so that you wonder why anyone used it at all. Presumably some printers or designers really liked it. Higgs certainly seem to have used Granby as a bit of a staple: searching the museum's archive of their work (not necessarily representative as it only shows front covers, and publicity matter rather than their newspaper work), I find Granby used quite a lot from 1936 through to at least the early 1960s regularly, and as late as 1979 in one case.