Jacket for the first edition of Ernest J. Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men, published in 1983 by Alfred A. Knopf. Illustration and design by Wendell Minor, using condensed caps from two weights of ITC Benguiat. Art direction by Lidia Ferrara and Sara Eisenman.

[…] a profound and unforgettable new novel set in a small corner of the deep South where, over the course of one day, the lives of a group of men and women may be changed forever. It begins with a murder: in the compound of a backwoods Louisiana plantation Beau Boutan, a Cajun farmer, is found shot. […] Ernest Gaines brings to this story the same rich sense of place, the same understanding humor, and the same compassion for a people and their struggle that have informed his previous, widely acclaimed novels.

Bloodline is a collection of short stories by Ernest J. Gaines. The first edition published by Dial Press in 1968 features a striking typographic jacket design. The title is rendered in bold condensed caps from Matterhorn or similar. The interletter spaces are partly filled in red, in what looks like a visual echo of the preceding letter’s counter shape, yielding a rhythmic pattern of black and red. The author’s name is set in the dignified caps from Bulmer.

The title page is set in Lydian Bold Condensed and Italic.

For the book interior, the body copy in Baskerville is paired with headlines and chapter numbers in Lydian.

A gorgeous example of type arranged on a bouncing baseline, on H. Lawrence Hoffman’s dust jacket for the first book by Ernest J. Gaines, published by Atheneum Books in 1964.

The title typeface is Craw Clarendon by Freeman Craw. The author name is set in italics from Century Expanded.