Two German typefaces from the 1920s, used together on the French single for “Zimbabwe”, a song from the Survival album (1979) by Bob Marley and the Wailers which was performed at Zimbabwe’s Independence Celebration in 1980. Berthold’s Schmale Block (or Block Condensed) was first cast in 1920. Ludwig & Mayer’s Koloss, which is here used in caps with alternating glyph colors, followed in 1923.

[More info on Discogs]

Source: auctions.concertpostergallery.com Psychedelic Art Exchange. License: All Rights Reserved.

On May 25, 1976, Bob Marley and the Wailers played a live show at the Civic Theater in San Diego, California, as part of the Rastaman Vibration Tour.

The biline/inline letterforms on the concert poster come from a rarely seen typeface. Barrio was carried as rubdown type by Zipatone, a company based in Hillside, Illinois. It’s shown in their catalogs from 1974 and 1976 as an all-caps design.

Fernando Mello. License: All Rights Reserved.

Glyph set of Barrio without lowercase as shown in a 1974 Zipatone catalog.

An undated glyph set shown by Luc Devroye additionally includes lowercase letters. Had Barrio been extended some time after 1976? Or is the showing older, and was the lowercase dropped because customers mainly used the uppercase (as in this Use)?

Source: luc.devroye.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Glyph set of Barrio with lowercase as shown in an undated Zipatone catalog.

Both showings include a Neufville credit, but no designer information. According to Wolfgang Hartmann of Bauer Types, a typeface named Barrio doesn’t appear in the Neufville records, and Neufville didn’t maintain a typeface design studio in the 1970s. Chances are the design originated at Fundición Tipográfica Nacional or FTF, two companies that had been acquired by Neufville around that time. Many Bauer typefaces were licensed to Zipatone, and Neufville represented Zipatone for the Spanish market in the early 1970s, says Hartmann.

Barrio has been digitized more than once. Harold Lohner’s Barril (2007) adds a second inline style called Barril Doble that can be used for layering. Quinceanera NF (2008) by Nick Curtis has no lowercase, but includes several capitals ligatures. Barrio CP (2011) is a freebie by Claude Pelletier and covers the original glyph set including the lowercase, plus diacritics.

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

Comparison of the three digital interpretations of Barrio.
Top: Barril and Barril Doble in a layered bichromatic setting. Unfortunately the two styles don’t line up perfectly.
Middle: Quinceanera NF is caps only. The font includes ligatures for CA, CC, EA, FI, FL, KA, LA, NT, ST, TZ, RA, RS, RY, SS, ZA (not shown) and two alternates for A and R (shown in “MARLEY”). These help to avoid the huge gaps caused by the extreme diagonals.
Bottom: BarrioCP. The font contains some kerning, but not for the RL pair.

On the poster, Barrio’s letterforms are arranged on a descending baseline, with the two A’s forming a diagonal. It’s paired with the stylistically similar Blippo Black, which was carried by Zipatone as well.

The poster is signed with “Roxy Art” and a name that reads “Vic Snyder” or similar. I haven’t been able to find out more. If you happen to know more about the poster designer or the creator of Barrio, let us know in a comment.

Album cover (front).

Survival by Bob Marley and the Wailers was released in October 1979. The iconic album cover with a grid of African flags was designed by Neville Garrick. The Jamaican-born artist takes credit for several of Marley’s best-known album covers. For the typography of Survival, he chose City, a modernist, low-contrast slab serif. The typeface is used in its boldest weight, and exclusively in all caps.

In an article by Elodie Maillot for PAM, the Pan African Music Magazine, Neville Garrick touches upon the design process:

Bob used to come up with the titles for the albums, but I would always suggest that he used a strong word like ‘Survival’, ‘Uprising’, ‘Confrontation’ […] Survival was a very political album. I was immediately drawn to the new African flags and their green-yellow-red colors. I didn’t know all the countries, so I contacted the United Nations to make sure I wouldn’t forget any! Of course, I didn’t include the apartheid-run South Africa. And then I also included shots of the holds of the slave ships where the slaves were crammed into. This drawing was supposed to represent the Black diaspora outside of Africa, otherwise I would have had to wonder if I should include a flag of Jamaica or of the United States! My issue was that Zimbabwe was still called Rhodesia and had a colonial flag. I finally included the flags of the two parties fighting for the country’s independence, ZANU and ZAPU.

[More info on Discogs]

Album cover (back). For the credits and the Marcus Garvey quote, Garrick used another slab serif. First cast in 1929, Memphis is just one year older than City (1930).

The inner sleeve shows the lyrics in all-caps Memphis, white on black. The image of Africans on a slave ship (see comments) is repeated on both sides, with a caption (in ITC Souvenir Italic) that reads: “This plan of a slave ship shows the stowage for the dreaded crossing of the Atlantic. The branded slaves were packed like so many non-human commodities.”

The promotional poster provides state names to the flags and basic information about each country. A map with 53 numbers helps to locate the countries on the African continent. The spots for South Africa (#42) and Zimbabwe (#53) are intentionally left blank. Western Sahara (#50) is listed with the note “Territory in dispute (no flag at present)”. At the bottom center, the Tuff Gong logo (in Mansard) is shown between the flags of Mali and Mauritania.

The choice of all-caps City fett was also picked up for a number of related releases. This is the German/Dutch single cover for “Survival” / “Wake Up and Live”, 1979. Designer unknown. [More info on Discogs]

The single sleeve for “So Much Trouble In The World” (1979) is a direct adaptation of Garrick’s album cover. [More info on Discogs]

From Wikipedia:

“Stir It Up” is a song composed by Bob Marley in 1967 and first recorded by his group The Wailers that year and issued as a single. The song was later covered by American singer Johnny Nash on his 1972 album I Can See Clearly Now. The following year, Marley and the Wailers re-recorded the song for their album Catch a Fire.

The song is also included on Babylon By Bus, a live album from 1978. This sleeve is for a single released by Ariola Benelux in 1979. The B-side “Rat Race” first appeared on the 1976 album Rastaman Vibration and is included on Babylon By Bus, too.

The typeface is a black weight from Churchward 69. Designed by Joseph Churchward in 1969, the squarish grotesk was a less commonly seen competitor to Ludwig & Mayer’s Permanent Headline & Massiv or Letraset’s Compacta. The eponymous family by the New Zealand-based type designer is listed in an early-1970s specimen by Churchward International Typefaces in six weights, in upright and italic styles. By 1974, Berthold Fototypes in Germany had issued four of the weights, plus italics. It’s not clear to me whether the record cover shows Berthold’s version, or whether there were other adaptations, too. The deep cuts in B and R and the (alternate?) W don’t match a showing in Berthold’s E1 catalog. Churchward 1969 was digitized by BluHead Studio in 2015 in five weights plus italics.

[More info on Discogs]

The back story for this compilation album and the label that published can be found on Discogs:

Originally released by Magnum Records, a short-lived New York City-based record company that specialized (for the most part) in low-budget bootleg and unauthorized recordings, this self-titled Bob Marley & The Wailers compilation is a collection of ten The Wailers tunes recorded with producers Arthur Jenkins & Johnny Nash for the JAD label between 1968 and 1972. Throughout the years, this compilation has been issued all around the world by several labels under several alternate titles including Soul Rebel, Mellow Mood and Jamaican Storm.

“Bob Marley & The Wailers” is set in Astur, a rustic typeface that suggests that the lettershapes were constructed with broken planks. The curved construction of the letters and the frayed terminals of the individual parts are reminiscent of brushstrokes rather than carpentry with straight planks. The design, credited to Carlos Winkow 1948, was available from Spanish Fundición Tipográfica Nacional.

Two concert posters for a concert by Bob Marley and the Wailers show the same typography and venue, yet the concerts are from different tours.

The 1977 poster was made for an Exodus Tour concert in the Paramount Northwest Theatre in Portland, Oregon on July 24 (the theatre closed down in 1984). According to Wikipedia, a toe injury of Bob Marley forced the United States concerts for this tour to be canceled – the concert advertised on the poster never happened. In the summer of 1978, Marley visited North America during his Kaya tour. This time, the canceled concert was finally performed, and recorded.

Two weights of ITC Korinna are used for the main information – tightly spaced in 1977, loosely spaced in 1978. Maybe due to the rescheduling of the concert, the date on the 1977 poster uses Clarendon. The bottom half of the poster was set in Univers in 1977, Helvetica was used the next year.

Natty Dread is a 1974 album by reggae superstar Bob Marley and his band The Wailers. The front of the album features prominent use of Banco in the Rastafari colours of red gold and green, while the inner sleeve lists the lyrics in Gill Sans Bold.

[More info on Discogs]

Back cover of the US pressing by Island Records, distributed by ATCO Records.

Inner sleeve with lyrics in colored Gill Sans Bold.

Magazine advertisement (origin unknown) by Island Records, announcing the imminent release of Bob Marley’s Natty Dread album. Unlike the inset suggests, Marley's album artwork uses the same fonts as the main text of the ad.

This compilation album published by Coxsone Records (a sub-label to Studio One) presents a collection of previously released tunes by Bob Marley and The Wailers from the 1960s and 1970s. Within the first year of its release it came in a number of different covers, the black and red version here is one of the earlier versions.

The cover shows Marley and two more Wailers (probably Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, who by the time had already left the group) placed in a frame of thick/thin rules. The printing is rather rough. That makes the cover charming in its own way, although that was probably the last thing the printers were aiming for – there was little time and not the best resources at hand.

The four typefaces for the cover are (all caps) Clarendon with Tip-Top for the first line in red, followed by a black line in Ringlet and the third line (red, all caps) uses Romantiques No. 5.

The typography on the back cover is too eroded to identify. If you have better eyes, leave a comment. The track listing seems to use a modulated san serif similar to Optima (but with a narrower W, a crossbar on the G and does that M have straight legs?) Other similars available at the time are Pascal and Theme. The notes are set in a grotesk sans serif.

On the record labels, most tracks are set in all caps Futura, with the fourth line using what looks like a light weight of Gill Sans.

[More info on Discogs]

Babylon by Bus is a live album released in 1978. Its cover came with a special design feature. Wikipedia:

The windows of the bus on the front cover were cut out, revealing part of the inner sleeve. As this was a double album, the listener had a choice of four different scenes to view through the windows.

Try to do that with a jewel case, not to mention with an iTunes jpeg!

The letters on the cover appear to be painted, but closely modeled after the tube-like Pluto.
Art direction and graphics by Neville Garrick. Tour photos by Junior Marvin, Kate Simon, Laurie Lewis, Neville Garrick.

[More info on Discogs]