6th printing

Seymour Chwast’s Blimp was available from Photo-Lettering in three variants. Blimp A – featuring letterforms filled with a gradient of stripes – was used for a paperback edition of The Invisible Man. The cover art is by Alex Gnidziejko.

5th printing, 1970

Book jacket of the 1975 edition, Franklin Watts, New York

A waterfall of all-caps letters lures the reader into Monsters, Monsters, Monsters. The anthology of horror stories selected by Helen Hoke was published by Franklin Watts in 1974. The jacket of the first edition featured Giorgio on the cover (see below). It was replaced with Eckmann for a 1975 printing. The included authors are Joseph Payne Brennan, Eric Frank Russell, E.F. Benson, A.W. Reed & Inez Hames, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allen Poe, Owen Rutter, H.G. Wells, Jacynth Hope-Simpson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Saki, Ambrose Pierce, and H.P. Lovercraft. The book contains pictures by Charles Keeping.

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Book jacket of the first edition, Franklin Watts, London and New York, 1974

The interior appears to be largely identical in both editions. This is the title page from the 1975 book.

Table of contents, with tabular oldstyle numerals for the page numbers

Story opening with the title in Giorgio. The text typeface is Plantin.

Half-title

This collection of science-fiction stories by H.G. Wells (1866–1946) was first published as Seven Famous Novels in 1934. This edition by Heinemann/Octopus from 1977 has no explicit title. Cover and spine only mention the author’s name, and the full-title lists the names of the included novels; The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon, The Food of the Gods, In the Days of the Comet, and The War of the Worlds. It uses Koloss for the cover, spine, endpapers, titles, and contents.

The cover and spine are debossed and printed with a gold-coloured metallic ink on a dark red hardcover. The endpapers use a shift-and-repeat design, with the shift chosen so that the left-hand slopes of the W on successive lines all line up.

The half-title, again featuring only the text “H.G.WELLS” uses an expanding crop-and-repeat design. The same design idea is used on the full title and the contents page, which share a similar design except for minor details such as the publisher's imprint on the title, and the text “CONTENTS” and page numbers on the contents page.

I assume the book came with a jacket, but sadly I do not have it.

[More info on ISFDB]

Front cover

Endpapers

Full-title

Contents page

Spine

From Lit Hub’s “The 75 Best Book Covers Of 2018 According To Book Cover Designers”:

Linda Huang’s repackaging for The War of the Worlds (as well as The Invisible Man) is so fresh, yet it feels nostalgic. The use of just black and white, and the retro font, keeps the design strong and bold. —Emily Mahon

The font in question is Persiflage, one of the 52 typefaces released in 2016 by The Pyte Foundry. In his review for Typographica, Frank Grießhammer describes it as a “very heavy marshmallow sans” and says he enjoys “the play of rounded versus straight corners.” I wonder what kind of “retro” Mahon had in mind. Persiflage reminds me of 1970s faces like Alpha or Too Much (the latter especially because of the thin middle bar in E). Chances are that type designer Ellmer Stefan referenced sources that are much older, though—maybe something like this variant of Caslon Rounded from c. 1841 which also mixes rounded and straight corners. His TPF Henry series is a more direct interpretation of Caslon’s early rounded sans serif.

The World in Time is a chapter from A Short History of the World by H.G. Wells. A whimsical and winding Deb by Erik Sachse (Napoleon Typefaces) has been used for headings. Set in Adobe Caslon.