The cover for Alfred Brendel’s recording of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies combines a vivacious illustration of a folk dance with equally wild display typography. Weiss is paired with all-caps Crayonette and Saphir. The numbers of the included rhapsodies are set in yet another flamboyant face, Fontanesi. In sum, there’s too much going on. I feel the illustration could shine more with a less eclectic typography. While the cover art is by Frederic Marvin (1932–2013), the overall design is uncredited. It may have been provided by Vanguard’s art director, Jules Halfant.

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The back cover is set in Times New Roman, with the title in Bulmer.

Cover of an album recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy, in honor of their 50th season, featuring Brahms: Variations On A Theme By Haydn and Liszt: Les Préludes. Released in 1949 in the Masterworks series by Columbia Records.

The design by Alex Steinweiss contrasts the static Onyx with the famous “Steinweiss Scrawl”. “Long playing microgrove nonbreakable record” is set in News Gothic Condensed.

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Liszt’s Les Préludes, Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, and Mendelssohn’s Ruy Blas, performed by the Vienna Tonkünstler Symphony Orchestra and released Plymouth Records in 1952.

For the cover, Curt John Witt worked with solid colors and strong, basic shapes – in this case triangles – as he often did. For the typography, Witt relied on the Black and Heavy (“Recorded in Europe”) styles of Tempo, Ludlow’s Futura follower. Its opening quote marks look like mirrored versions of the closing ones, see sign painters’ quotes. The orchestra’s name is in an unidentified gothic. It’s similar to Record Gothic Bold Condensed, another Ludlow face. According to Mac McGrew, however, this style wasn’t added before 1969.

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