Black Letter came up here on Fonts In Use before: Loring Eutemey picked it in 1964 for the cover of an album by Bent Fabric. Two years earlier, he already used it for Fathead Comes On by Dave Newman (1933–2009).

Armin Haab’s variation of Futura Black didn’t exist as a font for phototypesetting or dry transfer lettering. It’s rather an alphabet distributed in the form of a book: it was reproduced in Lettera 2 from 1961. Compared to Paul Renner’s 1929 design, it’s distinguished by boxier rounds in CDO etc. and pointed forms for AMVW, among other things.

The cover photography is by Lee Friedlander.

[More info on Discogs]

Liner notes by Mort Fega

Source: www.ebay.com Classical LPs (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

Album cover [More info on Discogs]

In 1977, Balkanton, Bulgaria’s state-owned record company, released an album with compositions by George Gershwin, performed by pianist Teodor Moussev and the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra under conductor Alexander Vladigerov.

The composer’s name is shown in inclined caps from an extrabold slab serif. It’s not set in a typeface. Instead, the letterforms were reproduced from an alphabet sample.

In her book Schrift und Schreiben (Leipzig, 1972), Hildegard Korger showed an “alphabet in the style of an italic Egyptienne” and two sets of decorative capitals derived from it – one with highlights and one with open letterforms – credited to Volker Küster, 1966. According to Günther Flake’s short biography of Küster, Black Bull is the title of a design for an Egyptienne typeface in three styles, drawn as part of his diploma project at HGB Leipzig in the mid-1960s. Korger doesn’t mention the name “Black Bull”, but I have to assume that the samples in her book show Küster’s graduation project.

License: All Rights Reserved.

Composite image showing letters from the “alphabet in the style of an italic Egyptienne” (top row) and two sets of decorative capitals derived from it (bottom row) by Volker Küster, 1966, from Hildegard Korger’s Schrift und Schreiben, VEB Fachbuchverlag Leipzig, 1972 (5th edition: 1982)

Scans: Библиотекус. License: All Rights Reserved.

Details from two Cyrillic adaptations of Küster’s all-caps highlight style, reproduced in Шрифт from 1975 (top) and Декоративные шрифты from 1987 (bottom). The latter is credited to Oleh Snarsky.

Black Bull was not produced as a proper typeface. It still got around, as Korger’s book was distributed abroad, including to “socialist brother countries” of the GDR, like Bulgaria and the USSR, where it inspired local designers. I’m aware of two Cyrillic adaptations of the all-caps highlight style that were reproduced in Soviet books, in Шрифт (Leningrad, 1975) and in Декоративные шрифты (Minsk, 1987). The latter is credited to Oleh Snarsky, a Ukrainian lettering artist who drew numerous alphabets for lettering manuals and alphabet source books, including original designs and Cyrillic adaptations of existing ones. Snarsky had previously shown sample words based on Küster’s alphabet in his book Шрифты/Алфавиты для рекламных и декоративно-оформительских работ (Kyiv, 1979).

Source: www.olx.ua Klq (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

“РЕКЛАМА ВЫВЕСКА” – page 31 from Шрифты/Алфавиты для рекламных и декоративно-оформительских работ (“Typefaces/Alphabets for advertising and decorative design works”), Kyiv, second revised edition, 1979. Snarsky shows a Cyrillic version of Black Bull’s highlight style plus an original reversed variant. The lines at the top and bottom are based on Roger Excoffon’s Calypso and Vendôme. The boxed glyphs in the center are either from an unidentified source or represent an original design by Snarsky.

The record cover features both Latin and Cyrillic letters based on Black Bull. Did the uncredited cover designer copy them from Korger’s book and invent matching Cyrillic themselves? Or did they get the inspiration from one of the Soviet books, and reverse-engineer the Latin? Chances are it was the former: the У in “ГЕРШУИН” matches Küster’s original Latin Y, while both Soviet adaptations feature different, asymmetrical glyphs.

Source: www.deezer.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Cover detail: the letters were applied individually – at least that’s what the unruly baseline and the disregard for the O’s overshoots suggest. Note that the first G has a thinner bar. Smaller text is set in a Cyrillic version of Futura.

Inevitably, Black Bull was made into a font eventually, at least in parts. Digital interpretations of the all-caps highlight style include Brad O. Nelson’s freebie Thats Super (Brain Eaters Font Co., 2001) and Brocken (RMU, 2011). To my knowledge, neither is authorized by the original designer.

Volker Küster died on 15 November 2025 in Kleve, at the age of 84. Born in 1941 in Wernigerode, Küster trained as typesetter and studied in Berlin-Schöneweide and subsequently at the Leipzig Academy. There he became the assistant of Albert Kapr and started teaching himself. He worked for the Typoart foundry and made himself a name as an award-winning book designer. In 1984, he left the GDR for West Germany. Küster started working for Scangraphic in Hamburg, where he headed the type design studio and served in the role of Type Director from 1985 to 1989. His Today Sans Serif, a groundbreaking humanist sans, was released in 1988. After many years of teaching, initially in Hamburg and then in Essen, he devoted himself to free artistic work including iron casting.

Natascha Dell posted an obituary (in German) on the website of the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen. It includes quotes by former students Stephan Fiedler and Karsten Luecke, praising Küster’s merits as an educator. Albert-Jan Pool – who started his career as Küster’s assistant at Scangraphic – shared memories including images on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Photo by Dick Polak

“Wonderful World, Beautiful People” is a single by Jimmy Cliff, released in October 1969. It became a #6 hit in the UK. The sleeve for the French market – where it failed to chart – uses letterforms from two alphabets designed by Walter Haettenschweiler and reproduced in the Swiss Lettera source books: Gaité from Lettera 2 (1961) and Roaring Twenties from Lettera 3 (1968).

The unknown sleeve designer created a double M ligature for the latter, and made some adjustments to the former, too: Gaité’s D was rotated 180 degrees. Maybe they deemed the slightly descending bottom serif inadequate for a D? The rotated glyph now serves as a de facto lowercase d (the alphabet did include actual lowercase letters). I was flipped as well, as one can tell from the different serif direction compared to T and F. Gaité could have shone brighter with more generous and balanced spacing. On the other hand: props for the attempt to build custom quote marks and a comma from the furcated serifs.

The title of the B-side is added in Univers 83.

[More info on Discogs]

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.

Source: fontsinuse.com Nick Sherman. License: All Rights Reserved.

Black Sabbath’s first four studio albums – Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master of Reality, and Vol 4, released in rapid succession between 1970 and 1972 – laid much of the groundwork for the heavy metal movement. While there were other bands playing heavy blues-inspired hard rock at the time, the gloomy, doom-laden stylings of Black Sabbath helped fuel their early success as one of the first – and most influential – heavy metal acts ever.

Sabbath’s dark aesthetic was established from the start with help from the visuals on their records. Their first four albums were released through the Vertigo record label in London and, as such, involved Vertigo’s in-house designer at the time, Keith Stuart Macmillan. Macmillan studied photography at Royal College of Art but has worked in various roles related to the visual side of music – from design to directing music videos. Early in his career he worked under the moniker Marcus Keef (or simply “Keef”) to avoid confusion with photographer Keith Lionel McMillan who likewise worked with rock musicians at the time.

In addition to his stylized photography, Keef also contributed design work to those first four albums, which – along with designs from the Bloomsbury Group – include now-iconic titling graphics. At least for the first two releases, he entrusted a fellow student from the Royal College of Art with the typography: it was Sandy Field who designed the titling for Black Sabbath and Paranoid.

Despite the ubiquity of those albums and the many design imitations they’ve inspired, the sources of their letterforms have been largely undocumented and obscured by the passage of time. Some of the albums’ titling has often, mistakenly, been assumed to be totally hand-lettered. Even when a typeface was suspected as a starting point, exact sources have proven elusive.

This situation is not surprising when you consider those first four Sabbath covers were all designed using uncommon sources from the era of phototype and dry transfer lettering – a relatively short period after the peak of letterpress printing but before the digital revolution. Type styles from larger companies of that era, like Photo-Lettering and Letraset, have been documented fairly well in subsequent years. But there were also smaller companies and publications at the time whose designs are still much less known today, partly because the original reference materials are so scarce.

All four of the first Black Sabbath records got their titling styles from exactly those kinds of niche sources.

Black Sabbath (1970)

Source: fontsinuse.com Neil Priddey. License: All Rights Reserved.

Though it is multiple generations removed, the titling style of the first, self-titled Black Sabbath album has its origins in an ornamented typeface from the Central Type Foundry called Harper, first released in 1882. The curly design was part of a wave of type styles from that era that tried to evoke a sense of exoticism through unusual forms.

Source: archive.org Internet Archive. License: All Rights Reserved.

1892 Central Type Foundry specimen of Harper.

Source: archive.org Internet Archive. License: All Rights Reserved.

1889 Franklin Type Foundry specimen of Harper.

Source: fontsinuse.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Harper Rimmed Initials as shown in the 1897 catalog of Day & Collins, a wood type manufacturer in Fann Street, London.

Harper included a set of outlined or “rimmed” initials which seem to have outlived the core design through adaptation by various other publishers over the years, for various other formats. One such adaptation was for fonts of wood type by the British company Day & Collins, who sold it as Harper Rimmed Initials. This adaptation, in turn, inspired many subsequent interpretations, especially during the era of phototype and dry transfer lettering.

One particular take on that design wasn’t even a proper typeface in the traditional sense, but instead was published as a standalone alphabet in the Twelve Unusual Alphabets Compiled by Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes portfolio (1970). This adaptation of Harper Rimmed Initials appears to be the one used by Field to compose the titling for the cover of Black Sabbath.

Source: www.flickr.com Stephen Coles. License: All Rights Reserved.

Sheet 9 from Twelve Unusual Alphabets Compiled by Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes. London: Mears, Caldwell, Hacker, not dated [1970]. This source was originally identified by Patrick Concannon.

Florian Hardwig. License: All Rights Reserved.

A lineage of adaptations of Harper Rimmed, from top to bottom:

1970 Black Sabbath cover detail feat. the Unusual Alphabet #9 by Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes, c.1970.

Harper with rimmed initials by Gustav F. Schroeder for Central Type Foundry, 1882.

Eminence by Photo-Lettering, Inc., 1962.

Manuscript Capitals by Bob Newman for Letraset, 1972.

Fancy Letter by Walter Haettenschweiler. Allegedly from 1957. However, the earliest known showing is in the 5th revised edition of Lettera 2 from 1976.

Abbey Scroll, shown by Formatt in 1974.

Daisy Rimmed, shown by Solotype in 1992.

Coincidentally, the Harper Rimmed Initials seem to have also influenced the design of the logo for Orange amplifiers around the same time. Black Sabbath weren’t regular Orange users but they were famously seen playing them for their 1970 performances on the West German Beat-Club television show.

Source: www.preservationsound.com Preservation Sound. License: All Rights Reserved.

The Orange amplifier logo as seen on an item in their circa 1970 catalog, seemingly based on some adaptation of the Harper typeface.

Source: www.youtube.com Beat-Club. License: All Rights Reserved.

Tony Iommi playing guitar through an Orange amplifier, from the famous Beat-Club performance in 1970.

Paranoid (1971)

Source: fontsinuse.com Heritage Auctions. License: All Rights Reserved.

Following the success of their debut, the pressure was on for Black Sabbath to quickly release a follow-up album. Keef again handled the photography and design. The photography for the cover was prepared with the idea that the album would be titled War Pigs (after the song), however the title was changed to Paranoid at the last minute and the short turnaround meant there was no time to prepare new photography, resulting in an unintended mismatch of imagery and text. Despite this mix-up, the album was a hit, furthering Sabbath’s heavy metal influence.

As with the first album, Field’s title design for Paranoid made use of a fairly recent, somewhat obscure adaptation of an earlier letter style. This time, though, instead of using an alphabet from a book based on a typeface, it was a typeface based on an alphabet from a book.

Scanned by Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Book jacket for Lettera 2 (left), “a standard book of fine lettering” edited by Armin Haab and Walter Haettenschweiler and published by Niggli in 1961. One of the included alphabets is Lettre coupé. The showing on page 53 (right) is caps only and omits the letter L.

In 1961, the Lettera 2 book was released as the second entry in the Lettera series of alphabet sourcebooks, published by Arthur Niggli Ltd. The book, edited by Armin Haab and Walter Haettenschweiler, included a collection of various alphabet designs – some taken directly from typefaces, others from original lettering samples. One of the samples was an original alphabet, titled Lettre Coupé, designed by Haettenschweiler with a hand-cut appearance.

Some designers adapted the alphabet for album artwork, sometimes modifying glyphs, altering the proportions, and/or improvising characters that weren’t included in the original sample.

By 1969, the alphabet had been adapted into a proper typeface by the Lettergraphics phototype company, offered under the name Black Casual. The typeface added new counterforms to A, B, and P, as well as a few new characters (L, comma, ?, and &). Black Casual appears to be what Field used to compose the titling for Paranoid. Given the Black name, the use might be considered a partial LTypI.

Scanned by Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Californian phototype provider Lettergraphics turned Haettenschweiler’s lettering into a proper typeface. Their adaptation called Black Casual can here be seen in a catalog dated 1969. It adds the missing L alongside some punctuation glyphs (comma, question mark, ampersand) and also introduces counters in A B and P.

Perhaps inspired by the dark vibes of Paranoid, Lettre Coupé was adapted in 1973 for the title sequence of blaxploitation horror film Scream Blacula Scream.

Source: www.artofthetitle.com Art of the Title. License: All Rights Reserved.

Title frame from the opening sequence of Scream Blacula Scream (1973).

Master of Reality (1971)

Source: fontsinuse.com Scanned by Nick Sherman. License: All Rights Reserved.

The cover of Sabbath’s third album dropped photography entirely and went all-in on a text-only treatment, with large, bold, in-your-face, typography – twisted and warped as if being shaken by high-amplitude vibrations, or distorted by altered perception. While the photography of the first two Sabbath records gave them a dark, otherworldly feeling, the Master of Reality cover also puts an emphasis on HEAVINESS.

The darkness wasn’t abandoned though. Below the purple band name, the album’s title for the first pressings was only distinguished from the black background via embossing, resulting in raised letterforms that are equally as tactile as they are visual. If the question is “How much more black could this be?”, the answer is: “None. None more black.”

Eventually the record companies releasing new editions of the album decided that “none more black” was too black and/or embossing was too expensive, so the cover has seen many variants over the years with the title alternately colored gray, white, orange, green, pink, black with white outline, and more. Some releases have also colored the band’s name in alternating rainbow colors.

Source: www.discogs.com Discogs. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

A sampling of the various colorways that have been used for Master of Reality over the years.

Despite the text-only cover, Keef’s stylized photography still made an appearance on a poster included as an insert with the original release. The design for the album is credited to Bloomsbury Group, a British firm active in the 1970s (apparently named after the early-1900s intellectual collective of the same name), with art direction by Mike Stanford.

The typeface on the cover is, yet again, an obscure phototype interpretation of an existing design. In this case, the ancestral type is Rudolf Koch’s Kabel which originated in the late 1920s. The reimagined adaptation used for Master of Reality is Lodwick Kabel, which pushes the weight of Kabel beyond any of its previous incarnations, and even heavier than ITC or Letraset would later take their interpretations in 1975 and 1980, respectively.

Nick Sherman. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

A comparison of the heaviest interpretations of Kabel as offered variously in phototype, dry transfer lettering, and digital type. Samples scaled to approximately matching cap heights.

Lodwick Kabel was available by 1970 from the Photoscript phototype company, and presented as an “Exclusive Royalty face”. The name suggests a possible connection to Hardy/Lodwick (a.k.a. Hardy/Escasany/Lodwick), a studio that was active in London in the 1970s – but that connection is unconfirmed.

Scanned by Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

London-based typesetting company Photoscript showed Lodwick Kabel in their List of Typefaces 1970, as “Exclusive Royalty face” and in two widths.

Scanned by Florian Hardwig. License: All Rights Reserved.

Lodwick Kabel as shown in a 1990 specimen book from the TypoBach typesetting company.

Since its release, the Master of Reality cover has been imitated many times, perhaps most prominently by British rock group Arctic Monkeys. Even Black Sabbath themselves have rehashed the warped sans-serif effect for a Black Lives Matter benefit T-shirt.

Vol 4 (1972)

Source: fontsinuse.com Internet Archive. License: All Rights Reserved.

The cover for Sabbath’s fourth album, appropriately titled Vol 4, continues the theme of extra-large, extra-bold type from Master of Reality. As with the precursor, the design is attributed to Bloomsbury Group with photography by Keef – this time credited by his real name, Keith Macmillan. For this release, Keef’s photography was brought back onto the cover, showing Ozzy with arms raised, giving his signature gesture of victorious peace signs ✌️ (not to be confused with the devil horns 🤘 popularized later by Ozzy’s successor, Ronnie James Dio). The image is treated more as a graphic element than a photograph, with a high-contrast monochrome effect, framed compactly on three sides with tightly-spaced, extra-heavy, geometric, sans-serif type. As with the previous albums, the name of the band and the name of the album are set in the same size and face.

Though there were plenty of heavy geometric sans-serif typefaces being used around that time with similar structural features, the style used for Vol 4 seems to be a primarily original design, and not a direct adaptation of some other existing face. The typeface in question is Gadget, available by 1971 from Alphabet Photosetting, who listed it as a copyrighted design. Dry transfer lettering sheets of a Lined variant of the face were produced by Zipatone, and they credit the design to Peter Bennett.

Source: www.flickr.com Scanned by Nick Sherman. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Glyph set for Gadget with alternate forms for c e &, from an undated catalog by Alphabet Photosetting.

License: All Rights Reserved.

The striped variant, Gadget Lined, was also produced by Letraset competitor Zipatone for dry transfer lettering. This sheet from their Zipatone Designers Fonts (ZDF) range has caps in 84pt. Thanks to this adaptation, we know that Gadget is the design of Peter Bennett.

Due to the obscure nature of Gadget, many people over the years have assumed the Vol 4 titling was a case of one-off lettering and not composed with a proper typeface. As such there have been multiple typefaces in more recent years using the iconic design as inspiration for creating new typefaces. It’s interesting to see how others extrapolate the letters from the cover into an entirely re-imagined set of glyphs – with some letters matching Gadget quite closely but others being taken to totally new and different places. Some examples include OZIK, Volume Dealers, and VolumeFour.

Nick Sherman. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

A comparison of the original Gadget with related digital fonts, namely: K22 Gadget, VolumeFour, and OZIK. The latter two examples were based specifically on the cover of Vol 4, presumably without using a full alphabet of the original Gadget as a reference.

The iconic nature of Vol 4’s cover also makes it a common subject for imitation and parody, especially with assistance from those newer digital fonts.

The Vol 4 design came full circle recently when the digital VolumeFour typeface inspired by the album cover was used for promotional materials and on-stage graphics for Black Sabbath’s final show, “Back to the Beginning”, on July 5, 2025 – less than three weeks before the passing of Ozzy Osbourne.

Source: www.jambase.com JamBase. License: All Rights Reserved.

Though Black Sabbath went on to release plenty of other noteworthy albums, the first four seem especially foundational. They are also unique in their common use of obscure typefaces, and their involvement of Keef for visuals.

Finding proper identifications for these typefaces has only been possible with the efforts of others, sometimes as a collaborative effort that unfolded over literal years in the comments of old Fonts In Use posts. Special thanks are due to Florian Hardwig, Daylight Fonts, Mark Simonson, Patrick Concannon, and Fontastique Faces. Additionally, Kory Grow’s interview with Keith Macmillan for Rolling Stone was extremely insightful, even though it didn’t discuss specifics of typography. Finally, investigative work for articles like this would be nearly impossible without Discogs and the Internet Archive.

If you have any further information about these typefaces or their use on the Black Sabbath records, please leave a message in the comments below or on the separate entries for each album. Those entries include more details about supporting typefaces, with additional detailed images:

• Black Sabbath
• Paranoid
• Master of Reality
• Vol 4

✌️

This album with Italian-style music by guitarist Al Caiola (1920–2016) from New Jersey was released in 1960 by Roulette Records. The cover photograph shows the Trevi Fountain in Rome.

The title typeface is a so-called Tuscan, drawn in Switzerland and baptized with a Spanish name: it’s Alex Stocker’s Juanita, shown in the first volume of the Lettera book series from 1954. The accompanying wide slab serif probably has roots in Germany, where it was named Breite Egyptienne (“wide Egyptian”). It later got a name that suggests a perceived Greek look or origin, Hellenic Wide.

[More info on Discogs]

Absolute Elsewhere is the fourth studio album by American death metal and progressive metal band Blood Incantation. It was recorded at Hansa Studios in Berlin and released on October 4, 2024, through Century Media.

The album artwork is credited to Steve R Dodd. There are some versions of the artwork where his signature appears. The vinyl release contains photographs taken by Nissa Lai and Julian Weigand.

Windsweep by Rodney Matthews is in use for the title on the album cover. It’s credited as “Wind Sweep”. Chances are the font in use is actually Rick W. Mueller’s digitization named Windswept MF [edit: no, it’s composed from a scans of the original alphabet, see the comments]. The typeface is also used on other promotional material such as tour posters and T-Shirts, alongside Hightower by Tobias Frere-Jones.

The band released a documentary about the making of the album on Youtube, called All Gates Open: In Search of Absolute Elsewhere. The typeface is used for the title cards of each chapter of the documentary.

[More info on Discogs]

Web poster with the dates of the Europen leg of the tour

This poster was designed for the Bachelor of Design at Monash Art, Design & Architecture, for the Monash University Open Day 2024.

A five-colour Risograph print in black, gold, pink, green, and red. Each colour represents one of the four disciplines — industrial, spatial, collaborative and communication design. Printed on Reflex A3 Copy Paper Pink (80gsm) and Envirocare 100% Recycled (100gsm).

Thank you to Warren Taylor and Monash University for getting us on board.

The ‘MADA’ lettering was extracted from Elzevir Initials, found in The Encyclopaedia of Type Faces by W. Pincus Jaspert & W. Turner Berry

Posters for Proboj (Crashing Thru, 1949), Graničarska Pravda (Range Justice, 1949), Potjera je završena, and Sjenke Zapada

In 1966, Mihajlo Arsovski designed a series of silkscreened movie posters for local distributor Kinematografi Zagreb. It promoted a collection of late 1940s American Westerns produced by the Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures, starring the actors Johnny Mack Brown and Whip Wilson.

The posters feature high contrast color palettes and use just three different typefaces: Egyptienne Bold Condensed, Akzidenz-Grotesk, and Red Roses.

In 2018, Mirko Ilić, Croatian-born designer based in New York, commented:

For Western movie posters, from 1966, this is an extremely unusual look. They look more like Punk-Rock concert posters from the late 1970s. Furthermore, printing in silkscreen is quite an unexpected technique for movie posters.

Poster for Zakon Zapada (Law of the West, 1949)

Poster for Tragovi se ukrštavaju (Crossed Trails, 1948)

In this copy, not only are the colors a little different. Also, the eyes have lost all detail, due to a surplus in ink. As Mirko Ilić comments, “printing in silkscreen is quite an unexpected technique for movie posters.”

Poster for Skrivena opasnost (Hidden Danger, 1948)

Poster for U ime pravde (Gunning for Justice, 1948)

Poster for Zakon se vraća u dolinu revolveraša (The Law Comes to Gunsight, 1947)

Poster for Natrag po tragu

Poster for Potjera je završena

Ruchome Piaski (English title: Shifting Sands) is a 1968 Polish psychological film directed by Władysław Ślesicki, starring Małgorzata Braunek, Marek Walczewski, and Grzegorz Zuchowicz.

Maciej Hibner (b. 1930) designed two poster variants. Both use Red Roses and Helvetica for the title and the genre label. Hibner modified Paul Sollberger’s shaded and contoured all-caps slab: he removed the black letter bodies, turning the design into an open face. The poster with the woman in bikini in front of a red sun has additional text in more Helvetica and Gill Sans. The second one with two smaller figures shown in the stylized desert has extended credits set in a version of Annonce / Aurora-Grotesk V – it’s probably Baccarat gruby as cast by the Warszawska foundry.

Details of the typography

From Wikipedia:

Jazz Blues Fusion is a live album by John Mayall. The first side is from a gig in Boston at the Boston Music Hall on 18 November 1971, and the second side was selected from two concerts at Hunter College, New York, on 3 and 4 December 1971.

The stencil caps used on the front cover are a bit of a mystery to me. On first look, they are from Filmotype Quiet. One characteristic glyph in that typeface is the low-waisted R with the curved leg. Unlike the P, the R on the album cover has a higher waistline, though, and no curved exit stroke. Was there an alternate? Quiet’s K likewise has a curved terminal – the one in “New York” doesn’t.

As soon as you zoom in on the bridges, things get messier. Not only are they a tad wider than in Quiet. In several glyphs, they are positioned differently. This includes A, H, M, V, W, Y, and Z.

It looks like the font in use is a close follower (or precursor?) of Quiet, of unknown origin. It’s neither Cargo Stencil Bold (Photo-Lettering), M-6 (VGC), 11-2 QU Mod Stencil (Lettergraphics), or Expo (Typeshop) – these all match the original Quiet. Maybe Britton Walters has the answer. In 2001, he made a digital font named G.I. Jerk … which is a match for the letterforms seen on the album cover from 1972. [edit: Ian found the missing link: it’s Sans Stencil, see comments]

No cover designer is credited. Photography by Steve Katleman (front) and Nancy Throckmorton (back).

[More info on Discogs]

John Mayall died at his home in California on 22 July 2024, at the age of 90. RIP.

For comparison: glyph set for M-6, VGC’s (presumably direct) copy of Filmotype Quiet, as shown in a 1969 catalog.

The narrow sans used for the credits on the back cover is Compacta.

Maelstrom vol. 3, no. 2, autumn 1967. Cover collage by editor Fred R. Fry II

Maelstrom is an American quarterly periodical published by Fred R. Fry II. The covers feature 8th and 9th Centuries, 16th Century, and Henry the Eighth, alphabet samples published in The Book of Ornamental Alphabets, Ancient and Mediaeval by engraver Freeman Gage Delamotte in 1858.

The decorative quality of these typefaces is emphasized by the layout, which frames the central illustration with text. Repeated three times on the cover, the title presents a unique display with each iteration, playing with text alignments, type combinations, and reading orientations. Complementing this design, the secondary information is set in a yet unidentified typewriter typeface – possibly an Olympia model.

Some of the Maelstrom issues are accessible on JSTOR.

Maelstrom vol. 3, no. 1, summer 1967. Cover art by art editor Cassandra Scher

Maelstrom vol. 2, no. 2, autumn 1966, with Fernand Léger’s Clown, reproduced from Slapstick and Dumbbell as published by Joseph Lawren in 1924

Maelstrom vol. 2, no. 1, spring 1966

Less than two years after the first Lettera compendium was published in Zürich, Schmalfette Grotesk had already reached New York, as evidenced by its appearance on this LP cover designed by Milton Glaser. It is used here for the title and the conductor’s name (though the latter misses an umlaut on the O), while all secondary information is in News Gothic Condensed.

[More info on Discogs]

This self-titled single by Bulgarian singer Mariya Neikova (1945–2002) was released by the state-owned Balkanton in 1972. For the cover typography, the uncredited designer used letterforms from Gros Titre, a capital alphabet drawn by Swiss art director Roland Schenk and reproduced in the second volume of Lettera.

The name of the “girl with the guitar” is shown twice, in Latin, here transliterated as Maria Neykova, and in Cyrillic, as Мария Нейкова. As Gros Titre is Latin-only, the cover designer had to mirror the R to obtain a Я (Ya). The И and Й (I/short I) were probably made by trimming an M.

[More info on Discogs]

This audio drama titled Приключенията на Лукчо (Priklyucheniyata na Lukcho) is a Bulgarian version of Gianni Rodari’s l romanzo di Cipollino (“The Adventures of Cipollino, the Little Onion”). Originally published in Italian in 1951, the children’s tale about political oppression became popular in the USSR and other countries of the Soviet Bloc. From Wikipedia:

In a world inhabited by anthropomorphic produce, Cipollino fights the unjust treatment of his fellow vegetable townsfolk by the fruit royalty (Prince Lemon and the overly proud Lord Tomato) in the garden kingdom. The main theme is the struggle of the underclass against the powerful, good versus evil, and the importance of friendship in the face of difficulties.

For this release from 1977, the unknown designer at Balkanton used letterforms from Lawless Type, an alphabet drawn by Walter Haettenschweiler and shown in Lettera 2 from 1961. Since this proto-typeface consists of the twenty-six basic Latin capitals only, the cover designer had to make some adjustments for letters without a Latin look-alike: V was flipped and И/Я flopped to obtain Л N R, Ч appears to be an H minus half a stem, Ю is a half an H plus a mirrored O, and П was built in a similar fashion. Thanks to Lawless Type’s irregular alignment and stroke contrast, such hacks don’t stand out.

I don’t recognize the sans used for the author’s name. The Czechoslovak Maršův Grotesk has a similar g, but as far as I can tell, it didn’t come in a Cyrillic version.

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Source: annyas.com License: All Rights Reserved.

“Rankin/Bass present” is lettering based on Weiß-Initialen Serie II, or Weiss Initials Series II, with the alternate forms for A and E, rendered bolder, with rough contours and a bouncing baseline.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a Christmas TV special that first aired on December 6, 1964. It was produced by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr. – then doing business as Videocraft International, Ltd., and later as Rankin/Bass Productions – in collaboration with the Japanese MOM Productions. From Simon Byrne’s article for Watch the Titles:

Based on the Johnny Marks song of the same name, it tells the story of the famous misfit reindeer with the glowing red nose who – together with his friends Hermey the elf and the bearded prospector, Yukon Cornelius – have a series of adventures, including run ins with an abominable snowman, a winged lion and an island of unwanted toys.

The stop-motion classic has been telecast every year since 1964, making it the longest continuously running Christmas TV special in the United States. It was directed by Larry Roemer, with assistance from Kizo Nagashima. The animation was supervised by Tadahito Mochinaga.

Source: www.artofthetitle.com License: All Rights Reserved.

The story’s narrator is Sam the Snowman, voiced by Burl Ives.

Source: www.artofthetitle.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Instead of MCMLXIV (1964), the roman numerals read MCLXIV, i.e. 1164. An error, or an obscure nod to the Romanesque period?

Source: www.artofthetitle.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.artofthetitle.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.artofthetitle.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.artofthetitle.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.artofthetitle.com License: All Rights Reserved.

The opening titles feature hand-drawn capitals with an unconventional distribution of thicks and thins, peppered with perky curls, with roughed-up contours as found in ruling pen calligraphy, and playfully arranged on a bouncing baseline. They are not taken from a typeface, and yet are closely patterned after prefabricated letterforms.

Source: www.flickr.com Scan: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Showing of Lawless Type in Lettera 2. Teufen: Niggli, 1961.

The source is Lawless Type, an alphabet reproduced in the second volume of Lettera. Started by Armin Haab and Alex Stocker in 1954, this book series was published in four volumes by Niggli in Teufen, Switzerland. The books were distributed in over 70 countries, and used by designers both as inspiration and as a direct source of display letterforms. Lettera 2 was edited by Haab together with Walter Haettenschweiler and came out in 1961. In the appendix, Lawless Type is described as follows:

With latinizing tendencies and italic elements, the skilled typographer can produce a sans serif with a naive effect all of its own. The individual faces [this should read ‘glyphs’ when compared to the original German text], however, must be readapted to each sequence of letters.

A note on YouTube by the Miser Brothers Press, who distributes merchandise related to the TV special, says that “[t]he lettering that is featured on the packages in the original end credits [not shown here, but stylistically in tune with that seen in the opening credits] was done by Tony Peters and Arthur Rankin, Jr.” Peters was the storyboard artist and Rankin was the producer. Rankin, who had worked as a TV art director, also drew the characters, so he probably directed Peters on the lettering.

Source: www.artofthetitle.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Lawless Type was designed by Walter Haettenschweiler. While the first edition of Lettera 2 exclusively credits the prolific designer from Zug, the fifth revised edition from 1976 additionally mentions co-editor Armin Haab. According to Martino Stierli,

it was inspired by the American artist and graphic designer Ben Shahn (1898–1969), who professed a socially critical realism but also experimented early on with typography and graphic design. Haettenschweiler’s homage to Shahn […] embodies elegance and festivity in its strict linearity, but by means of its title also expresses a certain rebellion against too much faith in rules.

In: Haettenschweiler. Schriften für die Welt, Logos für Zug. Zug: DNS-Transport GmbH, 2006 [my translation from the German]

Below is a piece of Shahn’s lettering that exemplarily illustrates this style of his, made for Haggadah for Passover from 1966. It includes the A with the asymmetrical top bar and the curling G. See also the painted jacket maquette on Letterform Archive’s website. This particular work can’t be the one that Haettenschweiler referenced, as it was published several years after Lettera 2, but Shahn employed this style already in earlier works.

Composite image: Florian Hardwig. License: All Rights Reserved.

Haggadah for Passover. Copied and illustrated by Ben Shahn, with a translation, introduction, and notes by Cecil Roth. Boston: Little, Brown & Company and Paris: Trianon Press, 1966.
Left and center: cover and spine, title page. Images: Invaluable.

Right: vellum box stamped with gilt lettering. Image: Henry Sotheran Ltd.

Source: hdl.handle.net Gerard Unger. License: All Rights Reserved.

A sampler of letterform variants found in Romanesque lettering, compiled by Gerard Unger and reproduced from his doctoral thesis, Alverata: hedendaagse Europese letters met wortels in de middeleeuwen. Universiteit Leiden, 2013.

Shahn didn’t invent the peculiar construction for A and G himself either. His lettering in turn takes cues from medieval inscriptions from around the 11th and 12th century. In his doctoral thesis from 2013, the late Gerard Unger examined the history and design of such Romanesque capitals. According to his research, capitals from this period – which precedes the Gothic style – are characterized by the blending of three types of letters from different times and cultures – namely derivations of Roman capitals, of uncials, and insular or Celtic letter forms, homogenized in terms of weight and contrast – as well as by exuberant variation and inventiveness. Among the endless variations collected by Unger is “the A with a flat top or with a transverse bar on top”. He also mentions the “coiled G” as a form frequently found in this period [all quotes: my translation from the Dutch].

Unger touches upon revivals and echoes of Romanesque capitals in the 20th century. One example is Shahn’s lettering. Unger offers a possible explanation for the presence of Romanesque-inspired forms in the artist’s work: immediately after completing his training in 1922, Shahn traveled through Spain and Italy, among other places. He probably saw Romanesque inscriptions or manuscripts along the way and made notes of them, later incorporating them into his graphics.

Source: www.flickr.com Scan: James Puckett (edited). License: CC BY.

Detail from a specimen for Weiss Initials Series II, showing its alternate forms for A and E as well as the curling G

A second example is Weiß-Initialen II, a set of initials by Emil Rudolf Weiß. To Unger, it is “as clear as day that these were designed along the lines of the Romanesque capitals”. First cast by Bauer in 1931, Series II was later extended as Weiß-Lapidar, with added numerals and punctuation as well as a second bolder weight. At least in a broadcast from around 1989, the end credits of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer aren’t rendered in Lawless Type. They are set – you guessed it – in Weiß-Initialen II.

Source: vimeo.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: vimeo.com License: All Rights Reserved.

For further reading on Romanesque letters, see Gerard Unger’s doctoral thesis (in Dutch) and the design notes for Alverata, his interpretation of “contemporary European letters with roots in the Middle Ages”.

Lawless Type was adopted for phototypesetting, under various names, but to my knowledge, there is no direct digitization. There are two digital fonts based on the title lettering for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: Island of Misfit Toys, a freebie with alternates made by Steve Ferrera in 2006, and Snow Job JNL, drawn by Jeff Levine in 2017. The former was used for a series of postage stamps issued by the USPS in 2014 [see comment]. Bensgothic is a font based on Ben Shahn’s lettering, started by Harold Lohner in 1998. For information about digital interpretations of Weiß-Initialen, see our typeface page.

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

From top to bottom: Lawless Type (Walter Haettenschweiler, 1961), Island of Misfit Toys (Steve Ferrara, 2006, using those glyphs that come closest to Lawless Type), Snow Job JNL (Jeff Levine, 2017), and Bensgothic (Harold Lohner, 1998)

This poster promotes an exhibition of sculpture by abstract artist Abram Schlemowitz at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City. The poster is undated but, according to his bio, Schlemowitz had two solo shows at the gallery in 1961–62, so it’s presumably from one of those years.

There is no designer credited on the poster, but Chermayeff & Geismar designed a series of posters for the gallery in the 1960s with the same typographic treatment of the smaller text, so I’d guess this is part of that series.

Some reverse engineering was required to recreate the unaltered setting for identification, but the large titling of Schlemowitz’s name is composed with sliced up strips of the Velos alphabet shown in Walter Käch’s Schriften / Lettering / Écritures book.

The smaller text details are set in Baskerville, with Howard Wise Gallery’s logo/info set in an outlined version of Grotesque No. 9.

Cropped detail of the smaller type

A reverse-engineered representation of the large type before it was sliced up.

Poster for Mitch Van Dusen’s live soundtrack performance to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Presented by the Pine Hill Community Center, it was the second annual live silent film soundtrack concert to celebrate the Halloween season.

Designer Darryl Norsen composed a collage with stills from the 1920 German silent horror film classic. For the type, he forewent an obvious period choice – like the expressionist Irrlicht or Caligari – and instead contrasted the imagery with Block, a set of three-dimensional caps reminiscient of toy blocks. In this context, and rendered in black and white, this 1970s design with its shifting counters takes on a creepy, claustrophobic vibe. Block is accompanied by various styles from Futura and an unidentified italic for the artist’s name.

Block was designed by John Gorham as a custom set of initials for a special educational series in The Sunday Times Magazine in 1970, and soon after released by Face Photosetting. I’m aware of one (uncredited) digitization, made available by Richard W. Mueller as Knockout Initials in 1993. Since that freebie is distinguished by a simplified A, and this poster has the glyph as drawn by Gorham, I assume that Norsen sourced the letterforms from a showing of the original, possibly the one in New Alphabets A to Z. If that’s true, he must have added the period himself – Block’s character set covered the basic capital alphabet only.

Stan Rubin and his Tigertown Five was a dixieland jazz band that formed in 1952 at Princeton University. This cover for their 1956 self-titled album was designed by the prolific jazz album designer, Burt Goldblatt.

The front of the cover features scribbly tiger illustrations on top of a relatively rare appearance of the Röntgen Therapie alphabet from Walter Käch’s 1949 lettering sample book, Schriften / Lettering / Écritures. The alphabet wasn’t produced as type for mechanical composition until more recent adaptations, but – like many other alphabets from Käch’s book and others like it – the letters were sometimes copied and pasted up manually for limited applications like this. Käch’s alphabets also served as a spiritual predecessor to the Univers type family: Adrian Frutiger was Käch’s student and incorporated many similar traits into his now-ubiquitous design. Supporting text on the cover is set in Century Expanded Italic with the design credit set in some small, wide sans-serif.

Goldblatt’s adoption of Kach’s alphabet seems somewhat unusual, since Käch’s book – published in Switzerland and still relatively new at the time – was likely much less common on the American side of the Atlantic. But this also wasn’t the last time Goldblatt would make prominent use of Käch’s alphabets.

The back of the album cover, on the other hand, is much more typical for workaday mid-1950s American typography, with a fairly plain and colorless composition set in Tempo and a dash of Ludlow Bodoni Italic.

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A double Lettera feature for the Dutch sleeve of the “Come Together” single by the Beatles, the opening track from their Abbey Road album released in fall 1969.

The band name on the front is rendered in tall skeletal letters with triangular terminals. They are derived from a capital alphabet drawn by Swiss designer Armin Haab. It was reproduced in the second volume of the Lettera source book series, first published in 1961. The only major deviation from the model is the letter S, which has a downward-pointing triangle at the bottom in Haab’s design. The apertures were partly filled with white areas enlivened by a spot pattern, apparently to give the spindly letterforms a bit more heft and presence. Chances are that the uncredited sleeve designer picked this style for its name: Haab baptized his creation India. One year before, in 1968, the Beatles had travelled to Rishikesh in northern India, a visit that received widespread media attention.

On the back, “Beatles” is shown in shaded Tuscan caps with mid-height spurs. This case is less clear: Judging from the proportions, counters, and placement of spurs, I believe this started out with Juanita, a capital alphabet drawn by Alex Stocker for the first volume of Lettera from 1954. If that’s true, its bifurcated serifs were closed in this application, and the original thin split shade dropped in favor of a long close shade.

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