Jane Austen’s Emma is a comedy of manners first published in 1815. The cover of Signet’s 1969 edition (CT388) features art by Alex Tsao. The typeface is not quite as old as the novel: it’s the solid style of Herman Ihlenburg’s Treasury, which MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan first cast in 1874.

Milton Glaser designed covers for a number of paperback editions of 19th-century novels by Russian authors: in 1960, he used Futura Display for The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy. A year later, he chose Bullfrog for Sergey Aksakov’s Family Chronicle. Also in 1961, Glaser picked Flirt for the Signet Classic edition of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls.

Paperback edition of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Signet Classics CP215, 1964. The cover art is by Seymour Chwast, featuring (a phototype version of) Page’s No. 500. “A Signet Classic” uses Caslon Extra Condensed.

Paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice as published by Signet Classics from 1961 on. The typeface is Caslon No. 540 Italic. In the early 1920s, Thomas Maitland Cleland designed a series of complementary swash characters, but judging from ATF specimens, there was no such alternate for the letter J. Chances are that the swash J seen here was custom made by removing the bar from F.

The cover art isn’t credited or signed. In this period, cover designers working for Signet included James Hill and Milton Glaser.

From the back cover:

The romantic clash of two opinionated young people provides the sustaining theme of Pride and Prejudice. Vivacious Elizabeth Bennet is fascinated and repelled by the arrogant Mr. Darcy, whose condescending airs and acrid tongue have alienated her entire family. Their spirited courtship is conducted against a background of assembly-ball flirtations and drawing-room intrigues. Jane Austen’s famous novel captures the affectations of class-conscious Victorian families with matrimonial aims and rivalries. Her people are universal; they live a truth beyond time, change, or caricature. George Eliot called Jane Austen “the greatest artist that has ever written,” and Sir Walter Scott wrote of her work, “There is a truth of painting in her writings which always delights me.”

Fontamara is the first novel by the Italian author Ignazio Silone, written when he was a refugee from the fascist police in Davos, Switzerland, and first published in 1933. This is the cover of a paperback edition published by Signet Classics in 1981, in a translation by Eric Mosbacher and Gwenda David, and with an introduction by Irving Howe.

The cover typography pairs two typefaces that carry the name of Caslon. The eroded one used for the title has nothing to do with the types cut by William Caslon and his successors, though: designed by Berne Nadall, it was released by Barnhart Brothers & Spindler in Chicago around 1896, originally as Fifteenth Century. Only later was it renamed to Caslon Antique.

Mentor / New American Library ME2722, date unknown. Judging from the price ($5.99 vs. 95¢), it’s a much later edition.

Futura Black in a circle of colorful dots, for the cheerful mid-century modern cover of Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories. While the Mentor Books edition shown above features 16 dots in rainbow colors and Akzidenz-Grotesk on black, the first printing published as Signet Classic in June 1966 has 20 dots of smaller size, in a color scheme that rather resembles disco lights, against a pomp and power background. The secondary type here is in Trade Gothic Extended, the wide style of Jackson Burke’s workhorse gothic, added to the family in 1959. Both Signet Classics and Mentor Books are imprints of New American Library.

[More info on ISFDB]

Signet Classics CQ307, June 1966.

Back cover of the Signet Classics edition, with a synposis set in Trade Gothic Extended. For some reason, the text features both its single-story and double-story forms for g.

Like The Egoist (CT 191), The Rise of Silas Lapham (CT 155) is a paperback edition published by Signet Classics in 1963 with an illustration by Saul Lambert. The typeface is the same, too: this time, Romanesque is used exclusively in caps. The cover designer very likely worked with the film adaptation named Xenotype 3835, added to Photo-Lettering’s library around 1962. Another version of this 1870s typeface is shown in Dan X. Solo’s Victorian Display Alphabets (Dover, 1976).

The Rise of Silas Lapham is a novel by William Dean Howells and was first published in 1885.

A Victorian typeface for a book by an author from the Victorian era: Romanesque was designed by Herman Ihlenburg (1843–1905) for MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan in 1874. The Egoist is a novel written by George Meredith (1828–1909) and first published in 1879. This is the Signet Classics paperback edition from 1963, with a cover illustration by Saul Lambert.

Davison Moulin Rouge and ITC Avant Garde Gothic in all caps, on the cover of The Selected Poetry of Blake by David V. Erdman (1911–2001), published as Signet Classics CE878 in March 1976. Illustration by Fred Otnes.

Columbus in use for Signet’s paperback edition of a selection of writings by Walter Pater (1839–1894), edited by Harold Bloom. Signet Classics CJ743, 1974.

Make It Old comments:

No visible signature in the cover art; it has Pushpin Studio written all over it.

Columbus had indeed been used by Milton Glaser at Push Pin Studios, see the “Take a Trip to Lotus Land” poster from 1967.

Designed by Hermann Ihlenburg, Columbus was first released in 1890 by the MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan foundry. It’s reproduced in Ludwig Petzendorfer’s Schriftenatlas Neue Folge (1903–1905), and was rediscovered in the 1960s. One such revival was made at Photo-Lettering. It’s shown in their 1971 catalog under the name Columbus Antique, with a second, slightly beefier weight.

US paperback edition of the famous French Gothic novel about Esmeralda and Quasimodo, set in Paris in 1482. Written by Victor Hugo, it was first published as Notre-Dame de Paris in 1831.

Signet Classics CQ460, 1965. Cover art by James Hill. Author and title are set in Hess Neobold. Its dark towering letterforms are adorned with tiny serifs that help to retain their sharpness.

Hermann Zapf's Saphir in use for a paperback cover of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. For the author’s name, the ornamented letterforms were filled in. Signet Classics CQ34, 1961. Cover artist: James Hill

CP259, fourth printing (60¢)

Hey, if Milton Glaser wasn’t above using the quirky italic with horizontal stress that is Crayonette, you can use it, too!

David Jonathan Ross just released his revival of the 19th-century novelty face as August’s installment of the Font of the Month Club. If you join today, you’ll get a copy, too. Crayonette DJR “retains the key features and proportions of the original, but improves its spacing and tames a few of the wilder letterforms.” While DJR has drawn a more conventional ‘k’, the original unruly glyph as seen in “Dickens” is available as alternate in Stylistic Set 03.

CQ514 (95¢)

451 CJ1335 ($1.95)

Tolstoy, L. (1960). The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. New York: The New American Library

Cover illustration by Milton Glaser. That LY letter combination is where Futura Display shines.

For comparison: Signet Classic CD13, 1960, 1st printing, featuring the same illustration (here with Glaser’s signature), but with generic gothic caps and Bodoni Italic.

Thalia was first cast in 1894 by Schelter & Giesecke. In this application, its blackletter-like T has been tamed down. The original metal Thalia/Juno did have unadorned caps, too, but the T looked different. Digital versions include Thaleia by Harold’s Fonts and Thalia by Profonts.

Signet Classics CQ438

The cover artwork is signed by James Hill (1930–2004), a prominent Canadian illustrator who did many book covers for Signet Classics. There is no additional design credit for the cover.