Peter Max’s Riverside Drive including its star-spangled Stars E style, used together with E.R. Weiß’s Weiß-Initialen Serie II, featuring both its forms for A and the round uncialish E, for the album cover to the Philadelphia Orchestra’s recording of The Planets, led by Eugene Ormandy.

The illustration by Colos shows the seven planets featured in Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite, populated by their respective Roman deities and surrounded by various constellations. In this interpretation, the planets don’t revolve around the sun, but rather around a colorful Earth covered by dark clouds.

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Detail

Morris F. Benton’s Freehand (ATF, 1917) on the cover of Rossini’s William Tell Overture as recorded by Eugene Ormandy with the Philadelphia Orchestra, released in 1972 by Columbia Records.

Cover design by Teresa Alfieri, with an illustration by Roy Carruthers (1938–2013). 1stDibs describes Carruthers’ work as “a brilliant mix of George Tooker and Fernando Botero but with unexpected charm”.

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This compilation with “greatest hits” by Johann Strauss was recorded by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and released by Columbia Masterworks in 1969. The watercolor illustration is by Milton Glaser.

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As we’ve documented before, users of Alphabet Lapidaire Monstre like to reduce the complexity of Jean Midolle’s 1830s piece of lettering. This album cover is another such example: all patterning is gone. So are the names at the bottom. The letterforms were made solid.

What’s left is the original white contour and the south-east shade with the extra split shadow line. That’s arguably still enough ornamentation. The modification also reveals the wonkiness of the underlying design, with a bulky S that feels much bolder than the A. If you’re after something with similar heft but a more balanced color, consider Jim Parkinson’s Sutro Deluxe.

The colorful art for this compilation of compositions by Mozart was provided by Milton Glaser.

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Milton Glaser was a Lettera user. For this compilation with recordings of works by Beethoven, he* opted for Walter Haettenschweiler’s Strada. The bold condensed face with all weight allocated to the tops and bottoms was included in the third volume of the Swiss alphabet book series, published by Niggli in 1967. The massive overshoot in round letterforms (see “oven”) can be found back in the original.

*) That’s assuming Glaser handled the typography himself, in addition to providing the cover art. Maybe it was an uncredited typographer at Columbia Records.

Prokofiev’s Greatest Hits features recordings by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic and by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was released by Columbia Masterworks in 1970, with illustration by James McMullan. The composer’s name is set in tightly spaced City fett. The squarish slab serif was first cast by the Berthold foundry in 1930, after designs by Georg Trump.

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Space Age is an extrabold counterless geometric sans designed by Murray Fuchs and issued by Photo-Lettering sometime after 1965. It came in three styles. In 1969, Milton Glaser chose Space Age A – with contour – for a Greatest Hits compilation of works by Rachmaninoff, released by Columbia Masterworks. He used it with slightly squooshed and partly overlapping letterforms and specified a different color for the contour.

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Cover for an album with Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky and Ravel, recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy, and released by Columbia Masterworks Records.

The phoenix illustration is by Charles Henry Alston (1907–1977). The painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist and teacher from New York City was active in the Harlem Renaissance. In 1990, Alston’s bust of Martin Luther King Jr. became the first image of an African American displayed at the White House. This is one of four album covers credited to Alston.

First released in 1953 with the same cover design, the image shows a pressing from 1956.

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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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