From Wikipedia:

Bid Time Return is a 1975 science fiction novel by American author Richard Matheson. It concerns a man from the 1970s who travels back in time to court a 19th-century stage actress whose photograph has captivated him. In 1980, it was made into the film Somewhere in Time, the title of which was used for subsequent editions of the book.

First published in February 1975 by Viking Press (with ITC Grouch for the title), this is Ballantine’s paperback edition from 1976. It features John S. Allen’s elusive Riptide.

1976 edition

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) was rejected by at least 26 publishers before Ariel Books finally accepted it in 1962. The science fiction novel went on to win the Newbery Medal, the Sequoyah Book Award and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, has sold over ten million copies, and was made into a movie twice.

Shown here is the 1976 paperback reissue by Dell/Laurel-Leaf as featured in the fifth season of Stranger Things: it’s the edition owned and cherished by Holly Wheeler (played by Nell Fisher).

“Now, don’t be frightened, loves,” Mrs. Whatsit said. Her plump little body began to shimmer, to quiver, to shift. The wild colors of her clothes became muted, whitened. The pudding-bag shape stretched, lengthened, merged. And suddenly before the children was a creature more beautiful than any Meg had even imagined, and the beauty lay in far more than the outward description. Outwardly Mrs. Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs. Whatsit. She was a marble white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen.

In 2023, Amory Sivertson of WBUR’s Endless Thread podcast was able to finally identify the artist responsible for the cover art: it’s Richard Bober (1943–2022). The designer who did the cover typography featuring all-caps Robur continues to be uncredited.

[More info on ISFDB]

The title page is set in Ludlow Garamond Bold.

1980 printing

Holly Wheeler reading her copy of A Wrinkle in Time in Stranger Things, Season Five, set in 1987

Theatrical movie poster

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) is a science fiction comedy that follows two academically underperforming high school students, Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Keanu Reeves) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Alex Winter), whose failure in history class threatens not only their friendship but the future of humanity. To prevent this, a traveler from the future named Rufus (George Carlin) arrives with a time-traveling phone booth, enabling the pair to journey through various historical periods and collect notable figures—including Socrates, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, and Abraham Lincoln—for their final presentation.

The logo is a combination of Bippie (for “Bill & Ted’s” and “adventure”) and custom lettering (for “Excellent”). The cashing credits are set in Univers Ultra Condensed. The tagline is set in Futura Bold Condensed.

Closeup view of the logo, from the theatrical movie poster

Presskit for the movie, showing the print version of the logo, which uses Bippie

First edition of Woman on the Edge of Time. The novel by Marge Piercy (b. 1936) is considered a classic of feminist and utopian science fiction, and often credited as one of the key influences for the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s.

Jacket designer R.D. Scudellari rendered the title as a massive brick structure, probably in allusion to the walls of the mental hospital in which the protagonist is unfairly incarcerated. By showing its underside, the block’s ponderosity is counteracted: it’s floating in space, adding a new perspective.

While the edges are custom drawn, the brick-lined letterforms are taken from a typeface: Norton Chimney is a design by S.E. Norton, issued by Photo-Lettering sometime in the 1940s. The author’s name is added in Matthew Carter’s Helvetica Compressed, likewise in caps and with a perspective shadow effect.

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

First published by Faber & Faber in 1967 as An Age, this science fiction novel by English writer Brian W. Aldiss was renamed Cryptozoic! for the first U.S. edition by Doubleday in 1968. A year later, Avon brought out the first paperback edition, with cover art by Don Punchatz. A second printing, still with Thorowgood Sans Shaded for the type but with different cover art, followed in 1972. Shown here is the third printing from 1977.

This time the display typeface is Sintex, designed by Aldo Novarese and issued by VGC around 1970. To be more precise, it isn’t the original Sintex, but a copy that added a large number of alternates. One of the added extra glyphs is the S in the author’s name. It looks too heavy and out of place, certainly next to the lighter “ALDI”. The extended copy of Sintex appears under the name Hopfen in catalogs by Castcraft (1978) and FotoStar (after 1981). Already in 1974, Formatt offered a version for dry-transfer lettering named Keyhole. It has the same alternates as Hopfen, but is distinguised by scaled-down lowercase glyphs. I don’t know which came first, Hopfen or Keyhole.

The second line with the title is stretched.

The cover illustration is credited to Don Ivan Punchatz on the copyright page. According to ISFDB, “[t]his art differs from the Punchatz-credited art of the first printing. It’s possible that the publisher failed to update the cover art credit for this printing. There is speculation that it might be the work of Dean Ellis.”

The back cover features another alternate from Hopfen a.k.a. Keyhole: the top-heavy D isn’t part of the original Sintex.

License: All Rights Reserved.

From Wikipedia:

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is a 2003 American science fiction action film directed by Jonathan Mostow. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, and Kristanna Loken, it is the third installment in the Terminator franchise and a sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). In its plot, the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet sends a T-X (Loken)—a highly advanced Terminator—back in time to ensure the rise of machines by killing top members of the future human resistance as John Connor's (Stahl) location is unknown. The resistance sends back a reprogrammed T-850 (Schwarzenegger) to protect John and his future wife, Kate (Danes).

Similar to the title sequences seen in The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the opening titles for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, designed by BiPack, Inc., are set in Earth. The end titles, designed by Scarlet Letters, are set in Eurostile.

License: All Rights Reserved.

License: All Rights Reserved.

The film’s title, typeset in Earth, as previously used for The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Opening titles designed by BiPack, Inc.. Curiously, the title on the one sheet poster, created by Intralink Film Graphic Design, appears to have used a modified version of Terminator Real NFI, a Terminator-style font derived from China and created by Thomas W. Otto (Norfok Incredible Font Design) in 2002.

License: All Rights Reserved.

License: All Rights Reserved.

License: All Rights Reserved.

End titles, designed by Scarlet Letters

The Devil on the Road is a fantasy novel by English author Robert Westall (1929–1993), first published in 1978 by Macmillan UK. This is the cover of the first American paperback edition, issued by Ace Books in 1985, with cover art credited to Barry Jackson.

The uncredited typographer used two contrasting styles from Inverserif, the Light Italic and the Heavy Italic. VGC released the typeface family with “inverse serifs” sometime between their 1973 and 1976 catalogs. Its designer is unknown to me.

[More info on ISFDB]

El petit de cal eril plays, as they call it, metaphysical pop. The artwork concept plays with the idea of time travel. The painting by David de las Heras recreates a scene in the future, but a future that seems classical, vintage and timeless. You don’t know if you’ve travelled forward or backward.

We selected New Gothic Textura because we wanted that medieval and esoteric look. The wine bottle is part of the merch, and connects with the eating and drinking scene of the painting. Jordi Llorens, a natural wine maker from Catalonia, made the wine driven by the music of the album.

Opening titles are typeset in Earth paired with Folio. There is also a brief use of Eurostile for credits featuring an ampersand. The main title, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, is also typeset in Earth with a debossed steel effect. The infrared Terminator P.O.V. sequences feature type set in a somewhat crude redrawing (see Q and R) of what is probably meant to have been Bessellen, as used in the first Terminator film from 1984, with additional text typeset in Helvetica.

The graphic design of the main titles is credited to Paul Olsen, with supervision by Ernest Farino. The Terminator P.O.V., video and graphic displays were made at Video Image (Rhonda C. Gunner, Richard E. Hollander, Gregory L. McMurry, John C. Wash).

A fairly early use of Davison Arabesque (Photo-Lettering, 1968), for the cover of Pyramid’s paperback edition of Lest Darkness Fall from August 1969. The alternate history science fiction novel was written in 1939 by L. Sprague de Camp. Cover art by Peter Bramley (1944–2005).

[More info on ISFDB]

Dutch translation (by Parma van Loon) of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novel Martian Time-Slip, originally published in 1964. This paperback edition by Meulenhoff came out in 1974 as #79 of the M=SF series, with cover art by Chris Foss.

The title typeface is Shatter, which probably was picked because mental illness is among the novel’s central themes. With its sliced-up and shifted letterforms, this typeface is sometimes chosen as a visual metaphor for schizophrenia, or disorder in general. Also, the Dutch verschuiving has the meaning of “shift”.

[More info on ISFDB]

Roslyn Gothic and Futura for the paperback cover of The Day the Gods Died, Corgi’s English translation of Der Tag an dem die Götter starben. The novel was written by German science fiction and fantasy author Walter Ernsting (1920–2005) who mainly published under the pseudonym Clark Darlton. The book opens with a letter from Swiss ufologist Erich von Däniken to the author.

Cover art by Peter Tybus, featuring Mesoamerican-looking pyramids.

[More info on ISFDB]