Cover of the zine Artemis, issue 5

Artemis is a zine apparently produced by St. Bride’s, also known as the Silver Sisterhood, sometime after February 1984. Sadly there seems to be only this one issue available on the internet. The cover is black line art on orange card.

The title appears to be lettering based on Art Deco, an all-caps typeface released by Mecanorma for dry transfer lettering. The round “Artemis” seal on the back cover features letterforms that stay close to the original design. The other occurrences build on the theme of thin-and-thick strokes with geometric construction, and add lowercase forms.

The subtitle, For Women who love Women, is set in Futura Medium Italic. The remaining text is a taster for Silverwolf, the regular story feature in the zine: “AT LAST” is set in Times Bold, “Silverwolf” uses American Uncial Initials, and “STRIKES BACK” is in Runnymede/Motto. All these typefaces were available from Letraset at the time, which would have been a popular choice for making zines like this, but there are no notes showing that it was Letraset type, other than the slightly uneven alignment of the subtitle.

The cover illustration is signed “Michele”, i.e. Michele Dennis. According to Aaron A. Reed, this might have been a pseudonym of Priscilla Langridge.

St. Bride’s was also the group publishing a series of computer games under The Games Mistresses branding.

Spread from the interior, with letters to the editors and an interview. Headlines are in University Roman (Letraset, 1976). The monospaced cursive in the speech balloon is IBM Script. There are at least three other (proportionally spaced) typewriter faces which are not yet identified. The body text looks like it was produced on one of the variable typewriters, maybe a Diablo or a Selectric.

Spread with a headline in Cathedral (Letraset, 1978).

Silverwolf is a serial story credited to Laeretta Krenne-Genovene, illustrated by Michele Dennis. According to Aaron A. Reed, “one or both of these people may or may not have been Priscilla Langridge.”

Back cover of Artemis 5, featuring Grotesque No. 9 Italic, which was also available from Letraset.

Galileo Magazine of Science & Fiction was a magazine edited by Charles C. Ryan and published by Vincent McCaffrey, Boston. From September 1976 till January 1980, a total of 16 issues were published. Throughout its run, the magazine featured a logo in Herkules.

#1 (Sep. 1976) with the eponymous Galileo Galilei and #2 (Dec. 1976), both with cover art by Tom Barber.

#3 (April 1977) with cover art by Tom Barber.

Contents and masthead, #3. The interior is set with an IBM Selectric Composer, using their Univers adaptation and a proprietary serif typeface named Journal Roman.

#4 (July 1977) with cover art by Tom Barber.

Spread from #4. Herkules is also used for all-caps headings and for boxed drop caps. The teaser text is set in Times New Roman.

#6 (Jan. 1978) with cover art by Ron Miller.

#7 (March 1978) with cover art by John Schoenherr.

#9 (July 1978) with cover art by Jeff Jones.

#10 (Se. 1978) with cover art by Larry Blamire.

#11 and #12 (June 1979) came as a special double issue. Cover art by Tom Barber.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

The Black Panther, published weekly by the Black Panther Party, shone a light on injustice, educated and organized the Black community, and promoted the party’s platform, the Ten-Point Program, which demanded full employment, decent housing, education, health care, and an end to police brutality.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Douglas typically kept font styles to a minimum, but this Black Panther cover explodes with Futura, Alternate Gothic, Ultra Bodoni, Clarendon, Univers, and Compacta. The tribute to Bobby Hutton is set on an IBM typewriter using Bold Face No. 2.

Like other publications of the 1960s and ’70s who sought independence from commercial requirements and cultural conventions, The Black Panther was made possible, in part, by the accessibility of new tools like transfer lettering, composing typewriters, and photographic reproduction. A new era of independent publishing empowered the Panthers to deliver their message on a regular basis to thousands (and, later, hundreds of thousands), despite the government’s continued efforts to shut down the paper and the party.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

The nameplate of the May 4, 1968 issue with typewritten Courier and Prestige, and transfer-type Futura.

The pages were filled with news stories and critical essays from party leaders, but it was Emory Douglas’ graphical contribution, in the form of cartoons, collages, and a full-page illustration on each back cover, that struck a chord with the broadest audience. At the age of 22, Douglas was the party’s Minister of Culture and directed the design of the newspaper from its inception in 1967 to the early 1970s.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

March 16, 1968, with headlines in Haas Inserat-Grotesk / Neue Aurora VIII, Venus Extended, and Grotesque No. 9 Italic, and text set on an IBM Selectric in Prestige. “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee” in the bottom right corner shows Lydian Italic and Futura Condensed.

Early issues were an assemblage of typewritten columns, makeshift rules, transfer lettering, and hand-drawn political cartoons. While the conditions were born of necessity, they gave the paper an aesthetic of urgency. In a 2017 interview with Letterform Archive, Douglas recalled the process of making the paper:

Initially, wherever we were set up, [usually someone’s home], that would be our production area. We used regular tables, regular lights, Elmer’s glue, rubber cement. We cut and pasted. We made up our own layout sheets. Non-repro blue markers. A lot of it was done on typewriter. We knew some folks in the publishing business, so every now and then we could get them to typeset the galleys.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

September 21, 1974.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Text set on a typewriter, likely in Wide Elite Victoria.

The limitations of the production setup yielded results that came to define the visual style of the paper, especially as Douglas gained experience with each week’s issue. The thick marker lines of his woodcut-inspired drawings were not only graphically appealing, they also masked the imperfect registration of the newspaper press.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Stymie Black for June 7, 1969 and November 1, 1969. Helvetica for March 13, 1971. These nameplates use Haas Inserat-Grotesk / Neue Aurora VIII (once featuring an R with a curved leg), Times New Roman, ATF Garamond Italic, and Bodoni Italic.

Headlines were typically set in rub-down type, or cut-out acetate lettering from Formatt. Douglas liked the product because it was cheaper than Letraset, and because the letters could be easily reused. Douglas remembers, “they had a line underneath the alphabet so you could set words without having to rub the letters off.”

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

April 10, 1971.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Futura was commonly used for illustrations.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

May 1, 1971.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

November 21, 1970.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Douglas wasn’t a stickler for typographic rules, but he hung his punctuation here.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

January 23, 1971.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

For his back-page posters, Douglas often took advantage of the one-letter-at-a-time flexibility of transfer type. He broke free of traditional grids and alignments and often set the type on curves and angles to fit within the illustration. In my favorite examples of his graphical typesetting, Douglas uses the cut-out letters within the scene of the artwork itself, such as in the protest buttons worn by his hero characters, or the iconic “ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE” newspaper of March 9, 1969 (top), or the “RENT RECEIPT” of July 25, 1970 (below).

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

July 25, 1970.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Douglas’ use of Letratone and Formatt shading patterns became another signature of his art. Not only did they add texture and interest to the illustrations, they were an effective, low-cost alternative to multicolor printing. Most issues of the paper were one-color (black) or two-color (black plus one color). At least ten different transfer patterns are used in this piece above. See examples of the source patterns below.

Source: letterformarchive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Formatt Catalog No. 6, © 1978 Graphic Products Corp.

At its height, from 1968 to 1971, The Black Panther was the most widely read Black newspaper in the United States. In fact, it was among the most widely distributed publications of any kind, reaching a peak weekly circulation of more than 300,000, rivaling the major newspapers of most US cities. It was eventually distributed internationally, with multiple centers in the US, anchored by the main center in San Francisco.

Portions of this article were excerpted from “Emory Douglas & The Black Panther” at Letterform Archive. All the images were photographed by the Archive from our collection. We are honored to host a special online event with Douglas on August 27, 2020.

All artwork © Emory Douglas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Purely typographic poster promoting a 1969 production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s opera, Utopia, Limited; or, The Flowers of Progress, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kresge Auditorium.

As with many examples of the International Typographic Style, the design uses a simple, structured composition of Helvetica with plenty of negative space. Interior boundaries and extenders in the tight-not-touching titling establish a grid for the smaller informational text below.

de Val is a mix of ambient music by Nina, released by Paralaxe Editions on cassette tape. The covers are letterpress-printed from hand-set type. They were designed (without any computers) by Oficina de disseny and printed at L’Automàtica.

The large condensed type, made from synthetic plastic, is Folio Bold Extra Condensed. It was almost certainly produced at Neufville in Barcelona where they made and sold plastic poster type – including some Bauer typefaces like Folio. [Dafi Kühne, “Alternatives to wood type in the 20th century” (MRes dissertation, University of Reading, 2019), page 85.]

The medium-sized “de Val” on the front of the cover is set in Venus ancha (Venus Extended) and the smaller type on the back is Venus fina (Venus Light).

The type on the cassette itself is rotogravure-printed Akzidenz-Grotesk.

Side note: Before finally confirming the identity of the large plastic type, I consulted with Dafi Kühne, Florian Hardwig, Indra Kupferschmid, Oficina de disseny, and a late-letterpress-era Neufville brochure scan from Hans Reichardt that specifically promotes Folio Extra Condensed as plastic poster type. This is a classic example of type identification research where the actual solution is almost inconsequential, but the effort is still totally worth it because of all the stuff I learned (or was reminded of) along the way. Thanks to everyone for indulging my curiosity!

[More info on Discogs]

Front

The Space Story was a radio program aimed at educating the public about NASA’s discoveries in the field of space science as well as their technological achievements. Each track (program) in this series was to be broadcast for one week, and had specific dates for broadcasting, as shown on the label. — Discogs

The narrator is Willard Scott. The front cover shows Wexford Ultra Bold, set in all caps on a curve. “Easy Open / Lift Here” features the lighter Bold weight from Richard A. Schlatter’s typeface family.

Back

Detail

Uniqueness and Diversity in Human Evolution: Morphometric Studies of Australopithecines is a textbook written by Charles Oxnard (b. 1933) and publised by the University of Chicago Press in 1975.

The dust jacket features Helvetica in three narrow columns and two weights. This arrangement is picked up for the title page. The interior is set in Times New Roman.

Front cover

Open Office Planning is a handbook for interior design and architecture, edited by John Pile. It was co-published in 1978 by the Whitney Library of Design, an imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, and the Architectural Press Ltd, London.

Two weights of Helvetica are used for the jacket. The interior typography (not pictured) pairs Times and Helvetica.

Back cover

Cover

From page 2: “The full name of the kind of computer we will study is ‘general purpose digital computer’. From now on we’ll simply refer to such machines as ‘computers,’ which is what everybody does anyway.”

This book should have been titled, Computer Programming in BASIC for Everyone Except Owners of TRS-80 Model I Microcomputers. The book should have been subtitled, Don't Be Misled by the Picture on the Cover. — librarything.com

Pages 1 and 2.

Pages 7 and 8. The glyphs and commands on the buttons of the keyboard image use an as yet unidentified (proportional) typeface.

Pages 33 and 34, showing actual (monospaced) printer output.

Summary.

Back cover, set in Univers.

A typo on the cover: “Electronic Music Studios of America(n)”

The EMS Synthi (first available in May 1971) was a portable modular analog synthesizer made by Electronic Music Studios of England. The EMS Synthi AKS (March 1972) was a version with a built-in keyboard and sequencer. The synthesizers were used by artists such as Brian Eno and Pink Floyd.

This handbook, presumably produced with an IBM Selectric typewriter, was written by Peter Grogono, a computer programmer who developed EMS software. The diagrams are captioned with IBM’s Script and Light Italic.

Incidentally, about 40 years later, Light Italic inspired Vulf Mono, a font used by audio software company Goodhertz.

Be Here Now (or Remember, Be Here Now) is a 1971 book on spirituality, yoga, meditation, etc. It was written by Ram Dass (a.k.a. Dr. Richard Alpert) a spiritual teacher known for his 1960s collaborations with Timothy Leary in the study of psychedelic drugs, particularly LSD.

The book is a feat of non-mechanical text arrangement, composed almost entirely with hand-stamped rubber type, often intertwined with elaborate illustrations to create a unique style of concrete literature. It was originally published as a box set containing several separate items in a limited edition, but has sold more than 2 million copies in a paperback format that combines all the content in one binding.

As Michael Cunningham describes the original book:

From Bindu to Ojas (the core book) was created in a New Mexico ashram (Lama Foundation) founded by artists and friends of Ram Dass. The founders of the ashram, Steve and Barbara Durkee, along with two other artists collaborated on illustrating Ram Dass’ teachings from India, which would ultimately result in Be Here Now.

Ram Daas explained the production process in a 1970 lecture at the Menninger Foundation that was later published in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology:

They start with these four-foot pieces of cardboard and this book is 108 pages and each day they meditate from five to eight in the morning – there’s a group of five of them – and then all in silence … they hand rubber-stamp each page, all the letters of the page, and then the artists do all the sketching around the thing. Then the whole thing is photo-reduced and shipped to Japan where it’s printed on rice paper and hand stitched because it’s an experiential-type document.

Most of the rubber-stamp type used for of the book is one of many existing interpretations of De Vinne. The cover of the book uses what is possibly a dry-transfer version of Caslon 540 or similar (it seems a bit too clean to be rubber type, though it’s not impossible). A few other rubber type faces make occasional appearances throughout the book, including something similar to Miller & Richard’s Sans-Serif No. 6, but the De Vinne face is by far the dominant style throughout.

An online version of the book transcribes the illustrative compositions with accompanying scans.

The rare, original box set edition.

Cover of one of the hand-bound books in the original box set edition.

Interior spread from a book in the original box set edition.

Cover of the paperback edition.

Another spread from the original hand-bound box set edition.

Layout by Nick Sherman, “Mercury” painting by Pascale Gueracague. Released in 2012 by Little Black Cloud Records.

Skylab was the first space station launched and operated by NASA. It orbited the Earth from 1973 to 1979.

(Discovered via space.kinja.com.)

TRW Systems Group designed and manufactured the descent engine or (LMDE) for the Apollo lunar lander.

(Found at space.kinja.com)

“Swiss born, Yves Zimmermann designed a captivating series of seven, black and white, text-only covers for TM in 1959 (yet published in 1960) – uniquely different than other covers TM had published. Apparently, the editorial team found the idea behind the designs too controversial and only published issue No. 1, January and No. 2, February. Perhaps the strong beliefs and theories of the magazine and the “Basel School” help explain why. 

Stylistically different than Zimmermann’s earlier TM covers in 1958, these new designs have a stronger purpose, evoking words as they are spoken and not as they are written. For example in issue No. 1 reading the right-hand column first, the letters spell out the title phonetically: te – em – 1 / tip – o / gr – afise / mo – naz / bl – etr. In issue No. 2 it should be read as: es – ge – em (as in SGM, short for Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen) / er – esi (or RSI Revue Suisse de L’imprimerie) / t – o / g – afise / m – naz / b – etr (or Typographische Monatsblätter).”

Read on on This is Display

See also Typografische Monatsbätter 11