Jo Ann Castle (b. 1939) is an American ragtime pianist who frequently appeared on The Lawrence Welk Show. This album of hers was released in 1967 on Pickwick Records.

The cover typography features West Espana. Drawn by Dave West, the French Antique variation with mid-stem spurs was issued shortly before: it’s shown in Photo-Lettering’s 1967 Alphabet Yearbook, alongside West Banjo.

Judging from the Q, the slab serif used for the song titles appears to be Cairo. Or maybe there was a version of Memphis that had such a form as well.

[More info on Discogs]

Fonts from the Flea Market #1169

Happy Honky Tonk is a ragtime album recorded by pianist Gottfried Böttger (1949–2017) and released by BASF in 1974. The title is in caps from Rhythm Bold, a bottom-heavy design made at Lettergraphics in or before 1968. It’s decorated with stars and accompanied by a manicule. City Bold is used for the track names.

[More info on Discogs]

Two light widths of Microgramma, neretta larga (extended) and neretta, used for the cover of String Band Strum-Along by jazz guitarist Tony Mottola, released by Command Records in 1961. A year later, Microgramma was revised and extended with a lowercase, now named Eurostile.

Art direction by Charles E. Murphy, with cover art by George Giusti.

[More info on Discogs]

From Wikipedia:

The New Vaudeville Band was a group created by songwriter Geoff Stephens [1934–2020] in 1966 to record his novelty composition “Winchester Cathedral”, a song inspired by the dance bands of the 1920s and a Rudy Vallee megaphone-style vocal. To his surprise, the song became a transatlantic hit that autumn, reaching the Top 10 in the United Kingdom and rising to #1 in the United States. Initially a studio group composed of session players, Stephens quickly assembled a permanent group to continue recording and to play live shows. The New Vaudeville Band placed several singles in the US and UK top 40 through 1967 before dissolving.

The Winchester Cathedral album was released by Fontana Records in 1966. While the British release has a photographic cover with Broadway, this post shows the US version with an illustration by Bob Post. It’s paired with Broadway Condensed. Its round forms for e, a, w, the triangular i dot, and the Futura Black-like r with the separated dot make it a much more animated design than its wider precursor. “The Original Hit!” is set in caps from Akzidenz-Grotesk’s breit fett style; “Monaural MGF 27560” is in Copperplate Gothic.

[More info on Discogs]

Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Bart Solenthaler and tagged with “benguiatjumpylatin”. License: All Rights Reserved.

Crazy Otto’s Back in Town is an album recorded by German jazz and pop pianist Fritz Schulz-Reichel (1912–1990) a.k.a. Crazy Otto, or Der schräge Otto. [More info on Discogs]

This cover design uses an early typeface design by Ed Benguiat. The highly prolific and influential lettering artist and type designer died this week at the age of 92.

The animated face with long triangular serifs and a bouncing baseline is called Benguiat Jumpy Latin. It must have been added to Photo-Lettering’s library some time before 1958, when this album was released. In 1962, Benguiat joined Photo-Lettering, Inc. as typographic design director – a position he held for many decades. Before that, he had already submitted several type designs to the composition studio in New York City.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Benguiat Jumpy Latin as shown in Photo-Lettering’s Alphabet Thesaurus Vol. 2 from 1965.

In an interview conducted by Ilene Strizver for TDC’s Type Legends series, Benguiat recounts the beginnings of his career as type designer. One day, Emil Schaedler, his teacher at the Workshop School of Advertising Art, had shown a Spencerian script typeface in class.

I decided to draw one, too. So I drew the first script. It took me about three days – it took [Schaedler] three years of whatever – and I took it to Photo-Lettering and showed it to Ed Rondthaler who was the president of Photo-Lettering, and he said “Beautiful! We’ll take it.” Not realizing they’d take anything … It wouldn’t make any difference. I was so proud that I called it after my wife Norma Script. And the second one after that was … a man at J. Walter Thompson called me up and he said to me: “Would you like to design a font for the Ford Truck Company?” And I said I’d be thrilled, and I named that one after my son called Johnnie. They’re both ugly, they’re both disgustingly ugly. It was really early ugly, and I know from ugly.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Ed Benguiat’s first typeface design, Benguiat Norma. The line below (“Youthful Beauty”) shows Normalock, a later addition with different capitals.

Many more and many better typefaces followed. Photo-Lettering’s One Line Manual of Style from 1971 lists 60 designs with more than 180 styles. And that’s just those credited to his name. Benguiat also had a hand in many other faces in the PLINC library. For example, he redrew classics like Franklin Gothic, Helvetica, or Futura, greatly expanding the original designs with new weights, widths and other variants.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Benguiat Johnnie (“Design mobility brings …”), the second of Ed Benguiat’s numerous designs, as shown in the Animated Gothics section of Alphabet Thesaurus Vol. 2.

Around the same time, the International Typeface Corporation was founded. ITC became the first independent licensing company for type designers, and Ed Benguiat was their vice president. The typefaces he designed for ITC were no longer available only to typesetting customers in New York, but were distributed all over the world, and remain popular to this day. Benguiat’s designs from this era include ITC Souvenir, ITC Korinna, ITC Avant Garde Gothic Condensed, ITC Lubalin Graph, ITC Benguiat, ITC Tiffany, ITC Bauhaus, ITC Bookman, ITC Caslon No. 224, ITC Edwardian Script, ITC Benguiat Gothic, ITC Barcelona, and ITC Modern No. 216, to name just the most successful ones. More recently, he collaborated with House Industries on a series of display fonts known as the Ed Benguiat Font Collection.

Ilene Strizver has dubbed him the Man of a Thousand Faces. Whether this number is accurate or not, the type world certainly has lost a giant. Rest in peace, Ed Benguiat.

See more Uses of typefaces designed by Ed Benguiat on Fonts In Use.

West Cooper Nouveau Swash Bold with shadow and interlinear ligatures, on the cover of an album by the Olympia Brass Band. Small differences between repeating letters suggest that this is lettering derived from PLINC’s alphabet style.

In Europe was recorded in Berlin on 4 August 1968 and released in 1969 on 77 Records, London. The jazz brass band from New Orleans had been revived under the historical name by saxophonist Harold Dejan in 1958. Dejan (1909–2002) led the band until shortly before his death.

The band had a notable part in the 1973 James Bond movie Live and Let Die where they lead a funeral march for a victim assassinated during the march.

Sleeve design by Stuart McMillan, with photography by Doug Dobell.

[More info on Discogs]

The compressed caps used for the title on the back cover are from Placard.