Final published design

From the publisher:

“Master of language” (The New York Times) John Edgar Wideman uses his unique generational position to explore what he calls the “slaveroad,” offering “a fresh perspective of slavery’s impact and a confirmation of Wideman’s exalted status in American letters” (New York magazine).

Alias Elephant is used for cover type. This published cover uses Elephant Light, a pre-published layout uses a hand-rendered Elephant Black.

Pre-release layout using a hand-drawn Elephant Black

Man and the Computer has its title set in Moore Computer, modified to knock out the distinctive freestanding dots in M and N. “John G. Kemeny”, author, is set in Helvetica.

The man and computer of the title are represented in the cover design by, respectively, a silhouette and a reversed out punched card.

Kemeny was notable for, among other things, being President of Dartmouth College (1970 to 1981), and co-developing the computer programming language BASIC. BASIC was invented in 1963 and became incredibly influential and popular on the minicomputers and microcomputers of the 1970s and 1980s (see, for example, the first million-selling computer book: BASIC Computer Games). At the time of this book’s publication, 1972, punched card would have been the principal method of submitting computer code for running.

The book is apparently a personal retrospective of computer up to that point.

The holes (white rectangles in this showing) punched in the card encode letters and numbers in EBCDIC; which when seen visually in a punched card could be considered a sort of alternate script. Each column encodes a single character (numbers have one punch, letters two). A card would normally have 80 columns, but here only columns 5 thru 28 are shown (and only partially at that). I had a go at decoding the punched card, and while it is only partly possible, the word “ABLE” is encoded in columns 18 thru 21.

Adrienne Adams (1906–2002) was an American children’s book illustrator. Published in 1980, The Great Valentine’s Day Balloon Race is one of at least five children’s picture books for which she also wrote the text.

Bonnie and Orson, two young rabbits, build a hot air balloon to enter in a St. Valentine’s Day balloon race

The formal script used for the title and also for initials is Domingo Script. It originated at Photo-Lettering in New York, probably in the late 1940s (type sample courtesy of Tobias Frere-Jones). To my knowledge, there is no digitization. You might like Filmotype York or Shelley Script. While the author’s name is in Baskerville Old Face, text is set in Monotype Baskerville.

You can flip through the whole book on the Internet Archive.

The Magician, written by Colm Tóibín and published by Viking Books (UK) and Scribner (US) in September 2021, is a fictionalised biography of German writer Thomas Mann (1875–1955), author of The Magic Mountain and 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. About the book, Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes in The Guardian:

This is an enormously ambitious book, one in which the intimate and the momentous are exquisitely balanced. It is the story of a man who spent almost all of his adult life behind a desk or going for sedate little post-prandial walks with his wife. From this sedentary existence Tóibín has fashioned an epic.

The jacket was designed Chris Bentham, with picture research by Lesley Hodgson. It represents a man starring at St Mark’s Basilica from a gondola, evoking Mann’s novella Death in Venice and his time spent in the city in the summer of 1911. The author’s name and the book title are set in Nizioleti (Abyme, 2017), itself a reflection of Venice’s identity.

The Magician was the laureate of the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022.

Viking edition (UK), with ITC Johnston used for the line at the top

Scribner edition (US), with Futura used for the small text

Poster for the serialized debut of The House of Mirth in Scribner’s Magazine (1905). Illustration by David Ericson. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

A gorgeous poster for Edith Wharton (1862–1937)’s 1905 novel, The House of Mirth, which was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine, beginning in January 1905. It was illustrated by David Ericson (1869–1946).

Apart from the magazine’s name, the poster is set entirely in Post Oldstyle Roman No. 2 (1900), featuring the alternate long-legged R and O/o with a diagonal weight contrast axis, which were included in the font in addition to more conventional forms. You can also see two instances of o’s with an upright contrast axis.

As Mac McGrew notes,

Post Oldstyle Roman No. 1 and No. 2 were designed in 1900 by E.J. Kitson, Saturday Evening Post artist, who had previously drawn each heading separately, and cast by ATF, while Post Oldstyle Italic was patented by Herman Ihlenburg in 1903. They are based on the lettering of Guernsey Moore [1874–1925], No. 2 being a heavier version of No. 1 […]

The poster measures 57×39 cm and was printed in color by the Grignard Lith. Co. It forms part of the artist poster filing series (Library of Congress).

Walter Tiemann’s Narziß (Klingspor, 1922), better known abroad as Narcissus, used by Will Jordan for the book jacket of New Year’s Eve. Via Lorne Bair Rare Books:

Play set in Manhattan, exploring themes of infidelity and disillusionment among upper-middle class intellectuals. The play was first produced by Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg at the Group Theater, 1929.

First edition published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1929.

Ed Benguiat’s moment-defining Caslon Black Swash feels perfect for this moment-recreating classic, by Ellen Sander, a first-generation pioneer of rock journalism, taking a fond backward look at an era that, by the time of the book’s publication in 1973, already seemed like a vanished age.

Palo Alto is a collection of linked short stories by American actor, writer, and director James Franco. The collection was published on October 19, 2010, by Scribner's.

For the hardcover jacket, prolific book cover designer Rex Bonomelli used Gotham, just as it was reaching the peak of its popularity, but went with the Extra Light or Thin weight, aligning the four stacked lines with ‘A’s diagonal, and coloring the text with a rainbow fill. Going very light is one way to meet the title size requirements of trade publishing without banging readers over the head.

Dust jacket (front)

First edition of Red Planet, a 1949 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein about students at boarding school on the planet Mars.

Cover art and interior illustrations by Clifford Geary. The reversed all-caps typography on the dust jacket pairs Warren Chappell’s Lydian (1938) with Futura. The cover exclusively uses the iconic sans serif designed by Paul Renner and first cast by the Bauer foundry in the late 1920. Technically, it might also be Intertype’s recutting under the original name (1939), or Spartan (1939), which was cut cooperatively by ATF and Linotype, and “is almost indistinguishable from Futura”, according to Mac McGrew.

Cover and spine

On the title page, Futura is complemented by another early geometric sans serif: The light style used for “A Colonial Boy From Mars” and the illustrator credit is from Vogue. This Futura follower was released by Intertype in 1930. Here it’s easily distinguishable by the long bar in G and the M with vertical stems. Intertype offered alternates that stay closer to Renner’s design, though.

The back and the inner flaps of the jacket additionally feature Lydian Cursive. The blurb is typeset in ATF’s Bookman Oldstyle.

Consumed is the first novel by Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. It was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in September 2014. The jacket is by American graphic designer Chip Kidd, using Roger Excoffon’s half tone 3D effect font Calypso (1958).

With a new theatrical version of this book coming out recently, a lot of television and internet sources have been talking and writing about the book and flashing this cover. I thought this version (some other versions use the same artwork, but I was unable to identify the type), which must at least be newer than 1996, used a pretty unique typeface. It turns out it’s Minimal, designed by Keystrokes AKA Douglas Olena for Monotype.

The lowercase glyphs are just alternate version of uppercase letters, and this cover only uses the alternate ‘a’. The designer also created a custom ligature for joining the ‘C’ to the ‘O’ in the author’s name. 

From swallace99’s Flickr stream