This compilation album with songs by The Mamas & The Papas was released in 1972, three years after the folk rock band broke up. Its cover design is not the most refined one, featuring a collage of mismatched photos of the four members that can be described as haphazard at best.

The title typeface is a rare one, though, which I haven’t seen outside type specimens before. It’s part of the Riverside Drive family, designed by pop artist Peter Max (b. 1937) and named after his address at 118 Riverside Drive in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Issued by Photo-Lettering around 1970, there were six styles, including solid, outlined, and contoured variants. This is the most spectacular one: the decorated Riverside Drive Stars E has letterforms filled with a pattern of stars, plus the occasional ringed planet. It’s here used in reverse.

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Detail

German sleeve for a single by The Mamas & The Papas, with the text arranged on the inner sides of two wings of a window, revealing the band portrait with stacked faces in the center. The tripartite layout is unusual and results in narrow columns with one word per line. Technically, the wings are too wide, of course, and would overlap when closed. The typeface is Windsor Elongated, the narrowest member of the Windsor series that originated at the Stephenson Blake foundry in England in the 1900s.

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The team of graphic designer Gary Burden and photographer Tad Diltz made a name for themselves with their work for The Mamas & The Papas. This album cover was for the group's fourth album, cleverly entitled The Papas & The Mamas. Futura Black and Deutsch Black make a good pair here.