Front cover of book 1, The Invasion

Animorphs is a series of young adult science fiction novels created by K.A. Applegate and published by Scholastic from 1996 to 2001. The cover illustrations are by Peter Bollinger (book 1), Tim O'Brien (book 2), and David B. Mattingly (books 3 to 54).

The Animorphs logo uses stretched Ramiz. Eurostile is used for the title, author’s name, and tagline on the front cover. The blurb on the back cover also uses Eurostile, except for an initial capital from Ramiz. The interior uses Trade Gothic, with Ramiz for chapter headings and the first capital of each chapter.

Later printings may have a promotion for the TV series adaptation (which aired from 1998 to 2000) on the front cover. One version has the text “Watch Animorphs on Nickelodeon” in Template Gothic Bold and Escalido Gothico, and “TV” in Graham Bold; another has “Watch Animorphs on TV” in Eurostile, Ramiz, Template Gothic and Escalido.

Front cover of book 2, The Visitor

Back cover of book 44, The Unexpected

Book 1, page 1

Front cover of book 21, The Threat, including a TV promotion at the top right

Detail

Front cover of book 49, The Diversion, including a TV promotion at the bottom left

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A Court of Thorns and Roses

A Court of Thorns and Roses is a fantasy romance series by Sarah J. Maas, started in May 2015 with the publication of the titular first book. It was concluded with A Court of Silver Flames, a New York Times #1 bestseller, in February 2021.

When Bloomsbury started reissuing the books in 2020, Patti Ratchford was in charge of the cover designs. The hardback edition got yellow titles against a colored background. This color palette was reversed for the paperback edition, which was released simultaneously.

For the ornate art, Ratchford brought in Violène Pont and Patch Monnier of Happypets, the Lausanne-based illustration and tattoo studio. For the typography, she exclusively worked with Grand Central by Tobias Frere-Jones, alternating between stacked-and-staggered, right-aligned and center-aligned title settings.

Chances are the all-caps serif typeface with roots in the French Oldstyle genre was selected for its thorny R – a hallmark glyph that appears at least five times on every cover. With over more than 13 million copies sold in total (across the editions), A Court of Thorns and Roses probably represents the most visible use of Grand Central to date.

Source: sarahjmaas.com License: All Rights Reserved.

A Court of Mist and Fury

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A Court of Wings and Ruin

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A Court of Frost and Starlight

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A Court of Silver Flames

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Box set with the paperback editions of the five books

Source: www.books2door.com License: All Rights Reserved.

The dust jackets for the hardback edition have colored titles against a gray background. The final book, A Court of Silver Flames, represents an exception, featuring orange cover art and white type.

Source: www.books2door.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Box set with the hardback editions of the five books

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Spine lettering on the jackets of the hardback edition

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Night Court Edition

The light novel series of The Apothecary Diaries uses Black Chancery for the covers of its English translation.

Black Chancery is a typeface from the 1990s who naive quirkiness seems to have given it enduring qualities. Here, it’s consistently used in white over the image, with a shadow blur effect the colour of which varies from cover to cover.

Netflix have also opted to use this timeless typeface for their title cards. Classic.
The y of “Apothecary” has a small inline highlight, which suggests a typeface modification; also copied by Netflix’s use.

Credits are added in Minion and Tangerine.

See all issues at J-Novel Club.

Detail from the Netflix page for The Apothecary Diaries

A playful cover designed by Joyce Hopkins for a collection of stories compiled by Aidan Chambers, aimed at young adults.

Joyce was a long-time designer with Harper & Row book publishers. She was also one of the organizers of the seminal exhibition Black Artists in Graphic Communication, held at Composing Room’s “Gallery 303” in 1970. The show included 49 Black designers working in graphic design at the time. You can read more about the show in a contemporary article by Dr. Cheryl D. Miller in the Communication Arts magazine. Based on the documentation of the show, the Lubalin Center has been gathering an extensive collection of material that represents artifacts and artists included in that show.

First-edition dust jacket for Why Have the Birds Stopped Singing?, a young adult novel written by Zoa Sherburne (1912–1995):

During an epileptic seizure while visiting her ancestral home, sixteen-year-old Katie is transported back in time and mistaken for her great-great-great grandmother who also had epilepsy at a time when the disease was greatly misunderstood.

The calligraphic serifless roman is York. Released in 1966 as one of 15 award winning type face designs in the National Type Face Design Competition sponsored by Visual Graphics Corporation, York was the first published typeface design by Georg Salden (b. 1930).

The v and y (as well as w) betray Salden’s rootedness in the German lettering tradition, cf. the construction of these letters in Fraktur. York isn’t often used in all caps, but when it is as in the author’s name, it looks a lot like a quickly written Optima (Hermann Zapf, 1958).

[More info on ISFDB]

Detail from the inner flap

Hilma Wolitzer’s young adult novel was first published in hardback by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1975. This is the cover of the mass-market paperback issued as Dell 94112 in March 1978, featuring Patrick Collins’s Rodin for the title. The cover artist is unknown.

From the back cover:

Detail

First edition dust jacket for The Girl Who Knew Tomorrow, published by William Morrow, New York, in 1970. Written by Zoa Sherburne (1912–1995), the book tells the story of a psychic girl:

Ever since she was a little girl, Angie Scofield has known that she is different. As she grows up and becomes the famous girl who knows tomorrow, she realizes that because she has ESP (extrasensory perception) she can never have the everyday, ordinary fun that other girls have. And then she meets Sam, who doesn’t know at first who she is. Now they must part. Will he write as he has promised, or will he just become another one of her fans?

The title is set on three concentric circles inside the iris of a stylized eye, with the word “tomorrow” being echoed several times. The top- and bottom-heavy typeface is West Kangaroo Bold, which was available from Photo-Lettering at least since 1969. The author credit is added in light extended caps from Eurostile.

The Other Merlin (Emry Merlin Book 1)

Robyn Schneider’s young adult series Emry Merlin is a humorous, fantastical, and romantic take on the myth of King Arthur.

The first book in the series, The Other Merlin, originally launched with a different cover. With the launch of the second book, The Future King, designer Tony Sahara created a cohesive visual system for the series and redesigned the first book’s cover. The covers feature Cortado set at angle for the titles and Zen Kurenaido for the supporting text. The lighter color palette of the new covers and illustrated characters combined with the free spirit of the title font better reflects the series’ jovial and imaginative content and establishes a uniquely identifiable look.

The Future King (Emry Merlin Book 2)

Original cover and redesigned cover

This One’s for You is a young adult novel by Kate Sweeney, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The book follows the relationship and personal development of two ex-best friends as they embark on a road trip after their high school graduation.

Theresa Evangelista designed the book jacket by creating a narrative interplay with the composition of the illustration (by Nicole Rifkin) and text. On the left side of the cover, the character’s upward line of sight follows the angle of the title, set in Cortado (with an apostrophe customized by Evangelista). The italic movement of the title flows with the right side character’s wind blown hair and leads to her downward stare. The author’s name is set in caps from Trend Rough Sans One.

Originally published by Collins in 1967, The Owl Service is a low fantasy novel for young adults. It won author Alan Garner (b. 1934) the annual Carnegie Medal and was made into a TV series in 1969.

The shown hardback edition from the Folio Society was published in 2013, with a preface by Susan Cooper. The illustrations are by Darren Hopes, with endpapers and title-page decoration by Garner’s wife, Griselda Greaves. It’s housed in a custom-made slipcase with green buckram ends and pale-green Clairefontaine Ingres papered sides.

The display typeface used on the spine and the title page is Ambicase Modern. In the first release by Teeline Fonts from 2011, type designer Craig Eliason explored the combination of upper- and lowercase forms – not side by side, but within the same letters. While the individual components look familiar, the combination exudes a strange and mysterious aura, not unlike the cover illustration of the girl with the owl face composed of plant parts.

Jugendstil meets blackletter: this ad was part of an insert included with Archiv für Buchgewerbe, vol. 49, no. 11/12 from November/December 1912. The featured typeface is Jaecker-Schrift, named after its designer Wilhelm Jaecker. The Stempel foundry in Frankfurt released it shortly before, in four styles; regular, mager (light), eng (condensed), and halbfett (bold).

Wilhelm Jaecker was born in Rehme and studied at the Barmer Kunstgewerbeschule, which was established in 1894 as one of the new schools in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1912, Jaecker worked as a young book artist and calligrapher in Leipzig.

In an article from 1925, thirteen years and one world war later, Emil Wetzig described Jaecker-Schrift as a pronounced broad-nib design of Gothic character, with handwritten qualities that could not be blurred even by being cut in metal. It is broad and open, with easily legible letters and capitals that are devoid of any of the ornamental additions that one encounters in monastic manuscripts. Its designer deliberately avoided handwritten pomp in order to clear the way for his creation to meet the manifold needs of the printer. Wetzig finds it particularly well suited for job work, but less so as book typeface.

Jaecker-Schrift came accompanied by swash initials, ornamental borders, decorative elements (Zierrat) and vignettes. The ornaments and borders used in the ad seem to be taken from another, yet unidentified source, though. “Union” sports one of the swash terminal alternates included in the font. “Verlagsgesellschaft” shows three different forms for one letter: the “round” s at the end of the first word in the composite, the long ſ, and a variant of the latter to go with the ligated ch pair – chances are Stempel provided a single glyph for this trigraph that’s common in German spelling.

Union Deutsche Verlagsanstalt was a German publishing house founded in Stuttgart in 1890. It was well known for books addressing a juvenile audience, including works by Karl May, or Else Ury’s Nesthäkchen. The ad doesn’t promote a specific title, but is generally about their “Schriften für die deutsche Jugend”, literally “Writings for the German Youth”. The title’s nationalist angle is echoed by the vignette depicting an oak tree seedling.

Ornamente, Vignetten, Initialen und Zierrat zur Jaecker-Schrift. Reproduced from Alphabet Ornamente, a specimen booklet with typefaces and ornaments for typographic designs by the D. Stempel AG, compiled by the Typographiche Vereinigung Leipzig.

A 1989 edition reprint of the 1981 book Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is a set of three horror-themed books aimed at younger readers, which became wildly popular in the 1980s and 90s due to outlandish and creepy illustrations by artist Stephen Gammell. The book series has sold over seven million copies as of 2017. The picture above features the 1989 reprint softcover edition of the first book.

The cover of the 1989 reprint of the first book shown at the top of this post is set in Caslon Antique, with Berling Italic used for the author name and illustrator. A first edition hardcover version of the book can be seen lower in this post, and uses Caslon Antique together with Palatino Italic in a slightly different cover arrangement.

The second and third book, share a similar cover arrangement as the first book, though the use of Berling has been replaced by a combination of Helvetica and Caslon Antique. It should be noted that some softcover printings of the first book (not shown in this post) also use a combination of Helvetica and Caslon Antique for the author and illustrator names.

This is an excellent application of Caslon Antique, in my opinion, as it provides a suitably creepy (but not too creepy!) feel to these children’s ghost story books.

The books have attracted some controversy in the 80s and 90s, with many parents trying to ban the books due to their imagery. The Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article on this subject.

More recently in 2011, another minor controversy occurred when the book's publisher printed new editions which replaced Stephen Gammell's scary illustrations with more toned-down illustrations by artist Brett Helquist. Comparisons can be seen on AIPT Comics. The controversy led the publisher to revert to the original Stephen Gammell illustrations in subsequent reprint editions of the book series.

From left: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1989 reprint of the 1981 book), More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1984 cover), Scary Stories 3 (1991 cover)

Interior book illustration by artist Stephen Gammell. Text is set in Palatino.

A first edition 1981 hardcover printing of the first Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book published by J.B. Lippincott, which has a different cover layout than the softcover edition which came out the same year. The accompanying italic here is from Palatino.

The inside title page of a first edition hardcover printing of the first Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book. Illustration by artist Stephen Gammell

The quote by Miranda Hart is set in an unidentified sans similar to Loew Next.

Daft Brush by PintassilgoPrints is paired with beautiful illustrations by Emmanuelle Walker on the covers of the Tabitha Baird books by Arabella Weir. Published by Piccadilly Press, this young readers series spans three books: The Rise and Rise of Tabitha Baird (2014), The Endless Trials of Tabitha Baird (2015), and Testing Times for Tabitha Baird (2015).

The lettering on the book covers makes use of Daft Brush’s alternates: there are four alternatives for each letter, two for numerals, and yet more alternates for punctuation marks. The OpenType contextual alternates feature instantly cycles the glyphs to achieve an organic, hand-lettered look.

The blurb on this cover is set in Gotham.

The Shades of Magic is a trilogy by New York Times bestselling author V.E. Schwab, published by Tor Books.

The first book, A Darker Shade of Magic, hit shelves in February 2015, followed by A Gathering of Shadows in 2016 and A Conjuring of Light in 2017. In the same year it was announced that Sony won a bidding war over the movie rights to A Darker Shade of Magic.

For the book covers, designer and illustrator Will Staehle chose the font Polyspring by PintassilgoPrints. He comments:

Once we locked on this design we went back and forth on a few possible type solutions, but ended up with this narrow serif. Lettering that feels a bit turn-of-the-century, while also creating a nice contrast from the very strong graphic circles of the cover.

Read more about the cover design process of the book A Darker Shade of Magic and see other cover approaches commented by Tor Books Art Director Irene Gallo on Tor’s website:

It is both playful and smart, sugesting that there is a really fun and clever adventure to be had.

I found this book on the street a few years ago. It is a German paperback edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Published by the Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag in November 1974. This is dtv’s 3rd edition, published in May 1976. When they printed the edition 27,000 copies had already been sold. This edition was printed in 11,000 copies.

The cover was designed by Celestino Piatti featuring an illustration by Klaus Ensikat. The type is Berthold’s Akzidenz-Grotesk. The text inside the book [not pictured] is composed in either Aldus or Palatino, from Hermann Zapf.

Jacket design for YA novel.

Caraval, a young adult fantasy by Stephanie Garber to be released in January 2017.