First U.S. edition, Vol. 1, Praeger, New York, 1973

The Operas of Verdi is the magnus opus of British opera scholar, radio producer and broadcaster Julian Budden (1924–2007). It was published in three volumes in 1973, 1978, and 1981; first by Cassell & Company Ltd., London, and by Praeger Publishers, Inc., New York. It was also published in 1978 by Oxford University Press, New York, who in 1984 were the first to issue the series in paperback.

The books feature a version of Arnold Böcklin that’s clearly bolder than usual. This style wasn’t part of the original design as issued by the Weisert foundry in 1904. Named Arnold Bold, it was added at Face Photosetting, a type provider from London that later also went under the name Face Ronchetti.

The jacket designs for the first edition are credited to Tony Geddes. Like Budden, Geddes worked for the BBC where he created program titles and support graphics. On Fonts In Use, he’s best known as the designer of typefaces like Bullion, Milton, and Flamenco Inline. Some of these were available from Face, so it seems likely that Arnold Bold was drawn by Geddes himself. Take note that this isn’t confirmed.

Glyph sets for Arnold Bocklin [sic!] and Arnold Bold as shown in an undated (c.1981) catalog by Face

First British edition by Cassell, 1973–1981: Vol. 1. From Oberto to Rigoletto; Vol. 2. From Il Trovatore to La Forza del Destino; Vol. 3. From Don Carlos to Falstaff

Vol. 3, Oxford University Press, 1978. Note how the I in “Verdi” lost a bit of its hook – unlike the one in “Julian”.

First paperback edition, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984

What’s more psychedelic than Arnold Böcklin? Right on, Böcklin in all caps! Here it’s used compleat with its weird H that follows the fraktur construction and the N with the enlarged lowercase form. Props for replacing the original J-like I with a plain form that performs better in all-caps settings.

The Latin species names are set in the IBM Selectric version of Univers.

This newspaper advert from Ann Arbor Sun, April 22, 1976, likewise uses Arnold Böcklin, in combination with handwritten text. Note the hand-drawn Böcklin numerals for the zip code.

Exhibition catalogue for Le Paris de la modernité (1905–1925), held at the Petit Palais, Paris, from November 2023 to April 2024:

From the Belle Époque to the Roaring Twenties, Paris continued, more than ever before, to attract artists from all around the world. This cosmopolitan city was both a capital where innovation thrived and a place of tremendous cultural influence. Paris would maintain this status despite the reorganisation of the international scene following the First World War, a period during which women played a major role, which has too often been forgotten. This exhibition demonstrate the dynamism of the period by highlighting the ruptures and brilliant advances that occurred, both artistic and technological. Through fashion, cinema, photography, painting, sculpture, and drawing, as well as dance, design, architecture, and industry, this exhibition showcases the rich creativity of the period.

The catalogue, published by Paris Musées, is designed by Lisa Sturacci, and set in Persona (Abyme, 2022) and Cardone (205FT, 2021).

Strange to your Ears: The Fabulous World of Sound with Jim Fassett is an album originally released in the 1950s by Columbia Masterworks. Hosted by Jim Fassett, this album consists of a series of strange sounds presented in a peculiar manner, and has become a cult classic for its experimental nature.

The title typeface is Morris Fuller Benton's Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed contrasted with Century Expanded Italic. Other typefaces are also found in the dotted speech bubbles.

[More info on Discogs]

Poster for the Paolo Nutini concert at Bonus Arena, Hull, in 2022. The name of the Scottish singer-songwriter is set in Motter Ombra and the other texts are set in Powerr’s Semi Bold weight.

Coffee & Wine played in the main stage of San Isidro festival inside the music program of the local festivity of the City of Madrid. To celebrate it LV–GD made a poster to promote it and some graphics for the stage screen.

For the poster design we look back to the early rock serigraphic posters of the 1970s with few solid colours and a bold graphic combination of illustration and type. Using the main motif of their last record Hirundinidae we based the poster in the silhouette of a swallow, carrying a red carnation that is the flower related to Madrid holidays.

Coffee & Wine is led by Ana Franco, one of the best female voices in the independent Spanish scene. The project is based on pop melodies that drink from folk, country and Americana roots.

Poster design for Major Murphy at Bell’s Eccentric Cafe with Phabies and Crooked Spires in Kalamazoo, Michigan on September 7, 2023. All thanks to Baby Teeth Dotted by the great Milton Glaser, this poster echos the charming tones of Major Murphy.

The June 1977 issue, featuring ITC Souvenir Medium contrasted with Orator (IBM) as its secondary typefaces.

Class Struggle was a publication by the Irish Workers Group that focused on political issues from a socialist point of view. Shown here is the run from the first to seventh issues; the subsequent issues switched to a Balloon and Flash-based layout.

The name of the publication is the compressed Compacta Light, with the Irish Workers Group logo set in Kabel Black. The accompanying typefaces depend on the individual issues, many of which were available from Letraset at the time.

The first issue uses ITC Souvenir Medium and Orator (IBM).

The November 1977 issue. ITC Souvenir Medium, Clarendon Medium, and an outlined version of Egyptienne Bold Condensed are the secondary typefaces.

The May 1978 issue stands out by using three colors: red, white, and black. Here, Kabel Black is brought to the forefront and is accompanied by ITC Souvenir Medium and Optima Bold.

The Spring 1979 issue. The outlined version of Egyptienne Bold Condensed is paired with Univers 75 and Optima Bold, with the date and price set in ITC Souvenir Medium.

The Summer 1979 issue, which features the bold weight of Compacta, Futura Bold (and Futura Condensed Bold, with wonky t’s that were likely repurposed from a different letter), Optima Bold, and Univers 75.

The November 1979 issue, featuring Futura Condensed Bold, Compacta Bold, Univers 75, and Helvetica Inserat.

The June–September 1980 issue. The cover features ITC Clearface Heavy, Windsor, Helvetica (in addition to an outlined version of the same face), and Univers 75 for the price.

The main title is in all-caps Impact, with the subtitle added in Univers.

Did you know one of the wealthiest cities on earth ran out of money?

Towards the end of the 1950s, U.S. postwar prosperity decelerated, marked by the Eisenhower recession of 1958. In response to the inflation and unemployment, every administration up to Nixon had used various Keynesian measures to ease the recession (Johnson’s Great Society, notably).

By the time Nixon won the election, the unemployment rate was at a 15-year low of 3.4% (BLS). Despite early signs of good economic tidings, his policies would worsen the inflation, increasing the cost of living dramatically. Not only did import tariffs do this directly, but U.S involvement in the Yom-Kippur war resulted in OPEC Countries embargoing the U.S, resulting in the most drastic rises in cost of living seen at the time (because of how car-dependent the U.S. is, if gas prices go up...all prices go up).

All the while, the country, and especially New York City, change in two key ways:

1. Decline of U.S. manufacturing and disappearance of manufacturing jobs, as liberal profit incentives attract capitalists to more exploitable labor markets (Asia, largely in a neocolonialistic phase). Needless to say, this meant less economic stability for the average worker, and less tax revenue for the city.

2. Suburbanization and “white flight” phenomena significantly dropped municipal tax revenue for decades at this point. Homeownership was a better prospect to those that could afford it than renting, and racists were attracted to segregated suburbs advertised as white-only all throughout America.

In the early 1970s, all this downturn culminated in the City of New York not having enough revenue to pay for its budget (payroll, public services, etc.). So, city officials began to borrow money from NYC banks to cover the gap in revenue (which leaders thought would be a temporary measure).

By 1975, the city was over $400 million in debt. The banks had no faith in extending NYC’s credit. Gerald Ford saw it as just punishment for the “insidious disease” of spending, refusing to help in any way when asked (thus the infamous “drop dead” headline).

To cut costs, Mayor Abraham Beame planned to lay off 16,590 municipal employees (including 1,000 policemen). In response, the Council for Public Safety (a trade organization of 80,000 city employees, many of them police) passed out pamphlets titled Welcome to Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York (pdf) warning tourists of the dangers of visiting the city. It was a sort of argumentum ad baculum (intimidation tactic), implying that laying off 1,000 policemen would make the city more dangerous and tourists would fall victim to crime.

Though property crime in NYC hit a then all-time high in 1975 (FBI), it was already rising substantially in the years leading up to the crisis with full police faculty (following the trend of cost of living and unemployment). It would then get even worse in the 1980s under austerity policies and even higher unemployment rates.

As for the city’s debts, unions and banks struck a deal to cover the debt and Ford eventually came around to loaning money to NYC. But in exchange, the city lost control over its finances. Under the terms of its new contract, the finance sector restructured New York City's economic policy: no more free higher education, thousands of layoffs of city employees, and transit fare hikes. The city became less and less livable to those of lower income, and became the playground for the wealthy it is today.

All text seen here set in two weights of Univers.

All text on this page is also in Univers, with the bottom italicized.

A striking jacket design with a provocative question, set with one word per line and featuring Marvin’s seldomly seen question mark.

From the publisher’s description:

This book is based on the famous experiments conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, which concluded that given an adjusted, controlled environment, most of us will act in a manner at total odds with our normal behavior patterns. Dr. Hans Askenasy agrees with these findings, and presents, with compelling logic and scholarship, a most disquieting view: that the Nazis who carried out the murder of six million Jews were neither sadists, madmen or monsters. Most of us would like to think they were, for then the responsibility for the atrocities they committed could be placed upon a special class of criminals or lunatics essentially different from the rest of us. Auschwitz could not, we like to believe, have happened here – yet it is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of evil. The author concludes that the main cause of large-scale destructiveness is not individual criminality, but social abnormality – a collective madness which we do not fully understand and with which we have not yet come to terms.

Hans Askenasy was born in Frankfurt in 1930 and emigrated to the United States in 1949. The psychologist wrote several books about the Holocaust. Are We All Nazis? was published by Lyle Stuart Inc. in 1978.

Grape Festival is one of Slovakia’s biggest music festivals. Each year, the festival gets a new visual identity. In 2022, Damian Pastirčák designed its visual identity with a custom drawn logo. Farmacia by Nguyen Gobber and Pexico Micro by Ondrej Jób were used for all further typographic applications.

The front cover of Daw Books' publication of The Orchid Cage, an English translation of a 1961 book called Der Orchideenkäfig by Austrian scientist and writer Herbert W. Franke.

The title typeface is Eagle Bold, originally produced in 1934 by Morris Benton as an all-caps spinoff of the earlier Novel Gothic. Cover art by Vincent Di Fate.

[More info on ISFDB]

Cover of a book called Grains et issues by French writer and poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), first published in 1935. This edition was published in 1981 in Garnier-Flammarion’s paperback series. .

Arnold Böcklin is used for the author's name. Handel Gothic is used for the title of the book. It’s used with the short r that was available as alternate in the phototype version.

The band with the publisher name is written in Eurostile Bold Extended, outlined. The logotype of the publisher is in each corner.

The illustration is by Joan Miró and was originally made for the cover of another book by Tzara called l’Anti-tête (published by Bordas in 1949).

On the back cover the text is set in Futura. We can also see the same band as in the front cover.

The printing and binding of the book was made by Maison Mame in Tours, France.

Cover of 1975 Pearchild Productions edition

In a February 2023 interview with James Edmondson for Ohno Radio, Carolyn Minott, granddaughter of Davida designer, Louis Minott, identified this cover as her favorite use of the typeface. She found it in a Portland bookstore and was amused at imagining her grandfather, who used very proper language, seeing his type on such an explicit book.

First published in 1975 by lesbian activist and artist Tee Corinne, the Cunt Coloring Book was created as a resource for sex education. The book was reprinted by Last Gasp in 1989, adding French, German, and Spanish translations.

“In 1973 I set out to do drawings of women’s genitals for use in sex education groups. I wanted the drawings to be lovely and informative, to give pleasure and affirmation. I organized the drawings into a coloring book because a major way we learn to understand the world, as children, is by coloring. As adults many of us still need to learn about our external sexual anatomy.” —Tee Corinne

In addition to Davida, the book’s labels and headlines appear to use dry transfer lettering in Arnold Böcklin and an unidentified sans serif (perhaps a knockoff ITC Avant Garde Gothic Condensed?), with an introduction set on a typewriter using a Cubic style.

First spread of 1975 Pearchild Productions edition

Cover of 1989 Last Gasp edition

Inside of unfolded invitation, 10″×14″

For The Paris Review’s 2019 Spring Revel benefit invitation design, Topos Graphics conveyed a broad range of book design with 18 carefully-selected bookish typefaces. Topos provided this explanation by email:

We designed a book shelf environment for text elements to be placed, composing texts as if they were individual titles. Different volumes of content got different character treatments. This functioned to compartmentalize the invitation’s hierarchy of info, but it also allowed us to approach each individual element anew. Like a personal library, the result takes on a character of its own. Tinged with old- and new-era sensibilities, we felt the selections—and the suite's ​ color palette—connected to The Paris Review’s 1960s advent and a contemporary moment—both in literature and typography. Book collections, like font collections, showcase a rich diversity of history, form and taste.

The invitation unfolded to a 10″×14″ posterette, with the front and back sides designed as a kind of A-Side, B-Side of a wooden bookshelf. The shelf cubbies gave us spaces—a semblance of a grid—to place information within. And that grid functioned through the event’s other collateral, like its printed program.

The annual event’s title “REVEL” is spelled out of book spines and a clever crop of Schmalfette Grotesk’s R. Strategic moves in hierarchy, with color, scale, and type orientation, create an engagingly graphic reading of a large amount of text. The books are energetically stacked, with the bookshelf bolstering as a grid to group and separate information.

Additional typefaces reflect different eras and aesthetics of book design: elegantly readable Garamond Premier, Paperback, and Study; mid-century classics like ITC Franklin Gothic and Lydian; genre-novel signifiers Ballast, Bookmania, and Cortado; stoic and structural ITC Lubalin Graph, Swiss 721, and Sentinel; contemporary and inventive Minérale and Canela.

Larger book spines use display typefaces to prioritize the most pertinent information, like the event location and speakers. Smaller type used uniformly suggests the repeated design systems of book series—Study for the board of directors and Schmalfette Grotesk for list of hosts.

The opposite side of the unfolded invitation provides a peek at the book blocks from behind the shelves and a quiet background for a mailing label. All information is repeated from the graphic side, set more traditionally in Garamond Premier. The attention to hierarchy persists, and ruled lines parallel the organizational function of the bookshelf.

Front of folded invitation. The Paris Review’s logo is segmented on book edges.

Outside of the invitation, unfolded

Close crop of the vector artwork

Close crop of the vector artwork

Close crop of the vector artwork

Close crop of the vector artwork. Garamond Premier is used in various of its optical sizes.

Close up of Minérale, Schmalfette Grotesk, Paperback Italic, and a little bit of Chrysaora

Close up of the writer hosts section using Schmalfette Grotesk

ITC Busorama with deep orange shadow for Ace’s 1973 paperback edition of Breed to Come. The cover art might be be Davis Meltzer, but that’s unconfirmed. The synopsis on the back is set in Dominante:

When desperate measures failed to control what men had begun and could not stop, they fled their polluted planet, leaving behind an epidemic virus born of experimentation. Yet unlike men, whom the disease could destroy, the animals of the planet thrived, each generation more forceful and intelligent than the last.

In the ruins of what was once a university complex a vast band of cats, more highly evolved than those on the outside, sought to master the works of man. And they learned that the Demons – as men were called – were not legendary, but real, as was the danger of their return to the planet.

Then one day a spaceship landed bearing the feared exiled race …

[More info on ISFDB]

Poster for the gig of psychedelic rock band Crumb at The Bishop Bar in Bloomington, Indiana in April 2019, supported by Corridor.

“Crumb” is set in Shotgun, with the rest of the text in all-caps ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

Czechoslovak posters for the 1964 musical comedy film A Hard Day’s Night directed by Richard Lester. The film starring The Beatles was first released in Czechoslovakia in 1965, titled Perný den (“busy day”), announced by a poster designed by Karel Vaca. The shown posters are for a later re-release, though: they were made in 1978 by Czech photographer and graphic designer Pavel Jasanský (1938–2021).

Jasanský used ITC Avant Garde Gothic, exclusively in caps from two weights, with appropriately tight spacing and a custom thin and flat acute accent. “Beatles” features a special EA pair – it’s one of several capital ligatures included in the typeface design by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase.

Mini poster (A4 / 12″×8″), with copy set in Vega by Stanislav Maršo.

Double-sided poster (front)

Double-sided poster (back)

Bottleneck (Letraset, 1972) together with Pinto (Rapitype/Mecanorma, ca. 1969) in use for the book jacket of A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, edited by Denis Gifford and published by Hamlyn, London, in 1973. The art is by Tom Chantrell.

Read all about it – cats, bats, phantoms, apemen and green rubber monsters, all from the lost world and dark houses of the Golden Age of Horrorwood! Watch the Mummy rise bandaged from its tomb, see Frankenstein’s creation reach out to grasp the sun, listen to the howl of the werewolves when the iron tongue of midnight has struck twelve!
From Mélies’ magic to the hauntings of Hammer, Denis Gifford will take you, ‘Raven’-loving reader, racing along in his ghost-ridden rattle-trap, a hair-raising journey down the highway of horror. No stones are left unturned and the long lost rise up to snarl and smirk beneath the dusty beam of the projector. The cinema’s sorcerers stand before you, splendidly summoned by anartful pen: Lugosi, curiously cadenced, blood on his lips; Max Shreck, shadowy, dissolving at dawn; the silken-voiced and unseen Rains; Veidt, lady-snatching on the roof-tops; Price, waxing strong in his museum; Laughton, bowed beneath his hump; beasts, brutes and mutants; zombies, devil bats and masked beings; claymen and vampires; dinosaurs from a distant era, things from outer space and horrors from the deep – all clamour for attention. Jekyll becomes Hyde, Kong becomes King, Lon Chaney becomes everybody and Karloff remains stupendously himself, bestriding the age in his eighteen-pound boots.
It is a book to be read, studied, treasured, looked at and, above all, enjoyed, and if you have to put it down, be careful not to step on it – it may be Lon Chaney!

The novelisation of Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 movie, written by the director himself – his first novel. According to Tarantino, the novel is “a complete rethinking of the entire story”, and departs from the film by adding new and re-ordered sequences, more detail and extra backstory to many of the characters.

The cover design is a departure from the original movie branding which had used the iconic Hollywood sign in its title. Here the font use and cream colour evoke a vintage, period design, fitting of the story's setting of 1969.

The title typeface is (fittingly) Americana Bold which is horizontally scaled to 72% and tightly kerned. Veronese is used for the smaller text.