While we’re at the topic of arcane alphabets on Black Sabbath record covers, here’s the sleeve for the band’s German debut single.

Printed in black, it features a photo of the four band members that gathers eerie vibes simply by the fact that it’s inverted (cf. the original). The rounded sans goes by the name CL Blue Cornet. I know hardly anything about it, beyond the fact that it’s shown in 1970s catalogs by Fürst, a German typesetting company with offices in Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt/Main. Was it an original release by this type provider? Who made it? Is it a revival of an earlier design? And what does the “CL” stand for?

The caps and numerals are dark and blocky, while the x-height is oddly short. The typeface is also amateurishly drawn: to single out one of the many issues, m is a good deal taller than n. I’ve seen a few wooden poster typefaces which exhibit a similar mix of a boxy build and rounded corners, by Berthold, Kloberg, Klinkhardt and others – but none that is a match. It might be based on one such design. Among digital fonts, Reymund Schröder’s Tempel Softland Condensed – which takes cues from the manufacturing process of wood type – comes somewhat close, at least for the capitals.

If you have any insight into the origins of CL Blue Cornet, please leave a comment.

[More info on Discogs]

Glyph set for CL Blue Cornet from a c.1976 catalog by Fürst, with alternate forms for ß l t

“Tomorrow’s Dream” b/w “Laguna Sunrise” is a single from Vol 4, the fourth studio album by Black Sabbath, released in September 1972. The Italian sleeve depicts a necklace with a cross pendant, with the heads of the band members shown between the four beams. The typeface is Tony Wenman’s Bottleneck, issued by Letraset in 1972.

[More info on Discogs]

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

✌️

Master of Reality is the third studio album by Black Sabbath, released in the United Kingdom by Vertigo on 6 August 1971.

The first pressings came with a poster featuring a photo of the band, taken by Keef (not depicted here). The album’s title is shown embossed, with the black-on-black lettering only visible in relief. Later editions would drop the costly embossing in favor of the album title printed in gray – as well as in many other colorways.

The letterforms were distorted to resemble a fluttering flag. They are taken from Lodwick Kabel, a weight extension of Rudolf Koch’s Kabel that’s bolder than Kabel Black (1929) and also ITC Kabel Ultra (1975). London-based typesetting studio Photoscript showed it as “Exclusive Royalty face” in their 1970 catalog. See the Blog post for more details.

[More info on Discogs]

Master of Reality was the band’s first album to include printed lyrics. They are set in Gill Sans, with caps from a bold weight for the titles. At least on the shown US pressing by Warner Records, the credits block uses News Gothic.

In this photo, the raised title lettering becomes a tad more visible: the protective foil accentuates the contours.

Paranoid is the second studio album by Black Sabbath. It was released on 18 September 1970, just seven months after their self-titled debut, and contains several of the band’s best-known songs, including “War Pigs”, “Iron Man”, and – a last-minute addition – the titular “Paranoid”.

As with the first album, the design and photography again was the work of Keith Macmillan a.k.a. Keef. Assuming the album’s title will be War Pigs, he dressed his assistant and model Roger Brown with a sword, a shield, and a pig mask (though the shots eventually used didn’t feature the mask).

From Kory Grow’s 2020 interview with Macmillan:

The “Paranoid” single came out in July and quickly became a hit, and Warner Bros., the band’s U.S. label, decided it was a better album title than War Pigs and requested that the band change it. Ozzy Osbourne remembers seeing sleeves printed up that said War Pigs on the front with the image of Brown, and was horrified when the title was changed to Paranoid.

“You look at the photo and go, ‘What’s fucking paranoid about that?’ ” Osbourne has said. “It’s two guys with shields and swords and pink leotards.”

Sandy Field, a fellow student of Keef’s at the Royal College of Art, took care of the typography. He used Black Casual, a phototype adaptation of Lettre Coupé. This alphabet of crude cut-out capitals was originally created by Swiss designer Walter Haettenschweiler and reproduced in the second volume of the Lettera alphabet source books from 1961.

See the Blog post.

[More info on Discogs]

Detail

Gatefold from a 1970 German pressing. Track names and credits are set in Times New Roman, just like in the original. The run-times – which are absent in the UK release – were added in a Garamond, alongside the small print in Univers and Helvetica.

Back cover

The Scottish rock band Nazareth did a cover version of Tomorrow’s “My White Bicycle”, which reached No. 14 in the UK Singles Chart in 1975, staying for eight weeks.

[More info on Discogs]

A great deal of tightly spaced Skjald caps, on Klaus Witt’s cover for … Where The Groupies Killed The Blues. The second album of German prog rock/heavy metal band Lucifer’s Friend was recorded by Conny Plank and released by Vertigo Records in 1972.

After disbanding in 1982, the band reunited in 2014, with three of the original members. Lead singer John Lawton died earlier this year, on 29 June 2021.

[More info on Discogs]

The credits and track names on the back cover are set in Baskerville.

The title track of Lighthouse’s One Fine Morning album from 1971 was a hit, not only in the band’s home country Canada, but also in the Netherlands. The cover of the Dutch single release by Vertigo Records uses tightly spaced Eurostile Extended for the titles. For the band name, the uncredited designer used ITC Honda’s caps in outline, and arranged them with tight-and-touching spacing. Any interletter space was eliminated by nesting the I into the L and interlocking the T between the two H’s. The square dot on the I is a customization that furthers the concept of compactness – Honda’s dots are round.

[More info on Discogs]

Spanish release, probably with the most elaborate type treatment: Georg Trump’s Time Script was slanted, set on a dramatic angle with tight letterspacing, and further enhanced with a gradient fill, gloomy shadows, and blood dripping from the double o. The script is contrasted with all-caps Washington Bold. The same sleeve design was also used in Germany and Austria. [More info on Discogs]

Five very different sleeve designs from various European countries for “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”, the opening title track and first single release from Black Sabbath’s album of the same name, released in late 1973 with “Changes” as B-side.

The covers provide a cross section of what was popular in display type at the time, although it’s difficult to make out one common trend. There’s the multiline/Op art theme (Black Line), the unearthed turn-of-the-century oddities (Tintoretto, Frankonia) including the hippie revival of Jugendstil/Secession forms (Dreamline), and the amorphous, bottom-heavy styles (Bottleneck, Putty Bold) that had come in fashion shortly before. At the same time, we see various sans serifs, ranging from classics to contemporary heavyweights (Antique Olive Compact, Neil Bold) and new interpretations of Art Deco themes (Washington, Premier Shaded), to futuristic ones (Handel Gothic). Eight out of 14 typeface designs originated in phototype and dry transfer, four were created in the previous three years. Now one could ask the chicken-and-egg question: Were those typefaces trending that were offered by the type providers? Or did the font makers respond to the current trends?

What I find more interesting is the fact that there were hardly any genre-specific typeface preferences yet. None of the featured typefaces is inherently “metal” or “hard rock”. This is different for the album: With the stylized blackletter on the cover, it’s instantly clear what kind of music it contains. Mean letterforms for mean music. On the international single sleeves, though, the styles are all over the place. Those were often made by local divisions of record labels and distributors. In most cases, the bands had no word in the design decisions. There was no well-defined genre typography yet, it was all still “pop type”. Just compare this set of covers to another one by ABBA from around the same time. The music and fanbase is very different. The type styles are fairly similar, though, and some fonts are even the same.

The French version by Série Parade/Vertigo likewise does without a photograph. It features bichromatic Tintoretto caps paired with lowercase Frankonia for the titles. Note the mirrored quote marks. [More info on Discogs]

Scandinavian version by Vertigo, ft. Antique Olive Compact. [More info on Discogs]

Italian pressing on WWA Records ft. Bottleneck and Gill Sans. [More info on Discogs] Why’s the final letter in the band name from the lowercase? As there’s nothing too fancy about Bottleneck’s H, I have to assume that the designer ran out of dry-transfer letters. The third B looks fishy, too – it may have been made by repurposing parts of other characters.

The Portuguese release wins the prize for most typefaces, randomly picked. The front cover has bichromatic Premier Shaded with filled-in counters and both forms of A, arranged on a bouncing baseline and paired with all-caps Neil Bold and Putty Bold …

… while the back cover surprises with a completely different, equally variegated mix of fonts. ft. Black Line, Handel Gothic, Dreamline, and Univers Condensed Italic. [More info on Discogs]

Beggar’s Opera is a Scottish prog rock band founded in Glasgow in 1969. Act One is their debut album, released in 1970 on Vertigo Records. For the album cover, KEEF chose to use what’s arguably one of the ugliest typefaces ever made.

Lettres Art Nouveau was drawn by French artist Étienne Mulier and published around 1900 in an album of 28 color lithographs titled Lettres et Enseignes Art Nouveau, as one of several capital period alphabets. It’s not Mulier’s fault that the typeface looks so hideous. He wasn’t a typeface designer, and very likely never intended his letterforms to be used in words, at least not directly, where they start resembling a train of bowels. They were rather conceived as inspirational lettering material, to be freely adjusted depending on the context. Furthermore, they would work as initials – single ornate capitals to mark the beginning of a text. The original was bichromatic, with the top and bottom halves shown in two shades of green. A charming set of whimsical initials, if you’re into the organic, flowing aesthetic from the turn of the century. A beautiful group of letters, not so much.

More than sixty years later, Walter Haettenschweiler and Armin Haab revived Mulier’s floral capitals. Their “redrawn and completed” version is reproduced in Lettera 3 from 1968, as Alphabet Art Nouveau, in solid black. It was probably this alphabet source book where Keef found the letterforms. Soon after, the piece of lettering was made into a typeface proper: Photo adaptations appear in a ca. 1977 Typeshop catalog as Art Nouveau. The Solotype catalog (1992) lists it as Novella. In 1999, Dieter Steffmann made a digitization named Art Nouveau Caps, with numerals taken from Arnold Böcklin.

[More info on Discogs]

The track list and credits on the gatefold are set in pink Goudy Oldstyle.

The opposite page shows a mirror image, with a darker version of the band portrait. The text is distorted as if it were reflected by the water surface.

Back cover.

Source: www.flickr.com John Wray. License: All Rights Reserved.

We’ve published a post about the German single sleeve for “Autobahn” earlier this week and mentioned that it uses the same basic artwork as the album cover as released on Philips Records, with Futura caps and the painting by Emil Schult (who, like Hütter and Schneider, studied in Düsseldorf). The UK release on Vertigo is very different, both in design and typography, and warrants a post on its own.

Most commentators emphasize the use of the motorway sign as the only pictorial element. It effectively turns the record cover into a traffic sign that declares: “From here on, no limits”. And indeed this audacious appropriation of a universally known symbol and everyday object is genius, and a consequent continuation of the striped cones that adorned the group’s first two albums. (Aside: As a kid, I couldn’t recognize the perspective road lanes with bridge. To me, it was the “trousers symbol”: two legs, complete with belt and suspenders. Today I can’t unsee an A for Autobahn in it. Not sure if this second layer was intended.)

Since this is Fonts In Use, let’s take a closer look at the type. While the use of Futura caps strikes me as almost too obvious – they’re a short hand for reduction/precision, Germany, cars, with endless “future” right in the name – the letterforms used for the UK release baffled me. I would have understood the choice of something like Bauhaus Geometric. But Tabasco?

Source: www.ebay.co.uk mattie_222. License: All Rights Reserved.

Detail of a dry-transfer lettering sheet showing the caps of Tabasco Bold. Originally released by Schaedler in New York, the phototype family spanned three weights (Light, Medium, Bold) plus a biline variant named Paprika. The Medium and Bold were adopted by Letraset in 1973/1974. Ascending/descending alternates were available for a range of letters.

This face may have some of the same features, like simple construction and monolinear lines. However, it’s much more lively, not sterile at all, with bulging curves, and feels like the (already twisted) 1970s view of Bauhaus letterforms cross-bred with Advertisers Gothic from 1917. In sum, rather funky and American than Teutonic and robotic. This is reinforced by the use of the hyper-extended alternates. Then I read what Colin Buttimer wrote on his excellent (but sadly dormant) Hard Format blog, and the font choice makes more sense:

Typographically, the design is fascinating as well. The letters R, W, R, A, U, A and H in the title are escaping from their settings, literally tracing new roads, setting off for destinations unknown. At the same time they’re dancing – the W, U and H waving and punching the air and the Rs and As stretching their toes out. The letter forms presage the tremendous influence the group would have on dance music and on the musical world as a whole.

Source: www.ebay.co.uk eatinglonggrass. License: All Rights Reserved.

Printed in a single color, the cover is enhanced by blind-embossing the white lettering and the symbol.

No designer is mentioned. It has been suggested that it could be the work of Barney Bubbles, who was commissioned by Vertigo Records for other cover designs. Discogs credits him for their version of the previous Kraftwerk album from 1973.

For the 2009 re-release on Kling Klang, Schult’s painting had to make way for the more iconic motorway symbol. Unsurprisingly, Tabasco was ditched in favor of “timeless” Futura caps. The cover adaptation has one major flaw: The road doesn’t bleed off the edges. Again Colin Buttimer nails why this is crucial:

Autobahn is fascinating because of its translation of the concept of travel into musical form. This transmission from one medium to another wasn’t a new one, but the extent to which it reduced the distance between musical composition and referent was and remains striking. Its central motif isn’t a melody, but the sound of cars approaching and moving away from the listener. The design perfectly encapsulates this by appropriating the motorway symbol and placing it so that it fills the cover from top to bottom. There is no end to the journey in graphic terms, it’s implied that the road continues outside the frame of the cover. Similarly the music ends with one more passing car rather than the sound, say, of an engine being turned off (Autobahn’s railway counterpart, Trans-Europe Express, ends with the sound of train brakes squealing).

[More info on Discogs]

Source: www.hardformat.org Hard Format. License: All Rights Reserved.

Front cover

Source: www.hardformat.org Hard Format. License: All Rights Reserved.

Back cover

Source: www.hardformat.org Hard Format. License: All Rights Reserved.

Detail from the back cover, with track list, lyrics of the title track, and credits, alls set in all-caps Futura.

Source: twitter.com John Coulthart. License: All Rights Reserved.

John Coulthart comments:

#nowplaying The vinyl, not the tape which isn't exactly hi-fidelity. The cassette was the first Kraftwerk I bought, however, so it's a sentimental keepsake. The cover caught my attention before I even heard the music. I’d stand outside the local record shop every week wondering what all the albums with strange artwork sounded like. One day this appeared. “Wow, they used a traffic sign!”

One of the most striking uses of a gatefold sleeve in my opinion. A complete contrast from the gentle, floral front cover to the sudden, grotesque imagery of death and decay when the full image is revealed.

[More info on Discogs]

Photograph of Mapledurham Watermill with false-colour photography by Keith Macmillan a.k.a. Keef, then the in-house album designer for Vertigo Records. Type treatment by Sandy Field, a fellow student of Keef at the Royal College of Art.

[More info on Discogs]

Keef’s panorama shot extends to the back cover. The model is Louisa Livingstone.

The gatefold with the infamous inverted cross, see the comments.

Very likely Letraset’s Bookman Swash Italic in use. ITC Bookman is not an accurate match.

Featuring the exotically named Zelda Plum as the front cover artist. Photographed by Peter Smith.

[More info on Discogs]

Typography by Sandy Field, cover design and photography by Marcus Keef.

The very first Vertigo “swirl” LP released in October 1969, designed by Marcus Keef and using his “false colour” photography style. Where on earth did he find those giant candlesticks?!

Another Keef surreal classic with his trademark “false colour” photography style. Typography in Eckmann by Sandy Field.

[More info on Discogs]

The album title was originally to be December Fourth according to a September 1970 article in Melody Maker magazine, but for some reason this was dropped and Volume Two was chosen.

The type on the cover of the “Tomorrow’s Dream” single looks a lot like West Barnum. However, it has unbracketed serifs, and the A has no top bar.

Photo-Lettering’s West Barnum Ultra, designed by Dave West and digitized by Ben Kiel & Adam Cruz, was film no. 5494 in the original Photo-Lettering archive. It arrives on Photo-Lettering with and without a shade. — House Industries

The ultra-heavy Western face was originally drawn in the 1960s. It is quite possible that there were variants and alternates.

There are two related but clearly weaker digital versions. One is PL Barnum Block, which is credited to Dave West, but — mainly due to more open counters in the uppercase and a looser spacing — doesn’t have the same punch as West Barnum. The other one is Bolster, an all-caps variation with a few “biform” characters.

I assume the term Barnum is derived from circus pioneer P. T. Barnum (1810–1891). It is also used as the name of the corresponding style category on the Photo-Lettering website, where it collocates all kinds of Circus types.

[More info on Discogs]

Unrelated: Black Slabbath, “the heaviest typeface in the world”.