Fonts from the Flea Market #1443

Georges Chelon (b. 1943) is a French singer-songwriter who released his debut album in 1965. In 1968, EMI Records brought out this compilation album to introduce him and his chansons to a German audience as well. Chelon’s name is set big and tight in caps from West Barnum, an exclusive by Photo-Lettering. Apparently it was important to the marketing department to make the singer’s country of origin crystal clear: not only was Chelon’s face colored in red, white and blue; a tricolore band was added to the sleeve as well.

Aldo Novarese (1920–1995) worked for Nebiolo for thirty-seven years. After the foundry in Turin ceased its type design activities, the Italian type designer turned to new publishing partners and found them in ITC, Berthold, and Linotype. In addition, he released nearly a dozen typefaces with Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC), the Florida-based manufacturer of the Photo Typositor.

One of these designs is Andromeda, released in 1978 in two weights. The capitals are basically a revision of those for his earlier Spazio, with wider proportions and slightly angled instead of vertical terminals. Andromeda’s lowercase is funkier, though, and introduces forms for a e h m q that resemble capital letters, yielding a caps-with-small caps look. It’s also reminiscient of Cassandre’s Peignot, especially the h that looks like a scaled-down cap with elongated left stem.

In this application, we only get to see the uppercase. It’s the album cover for The Planets as performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis (1944–2024) at the Centre in the Square, Kitchener, Ontario, on 20 January 1986.

The logo for His Master’s Voice Digital features Yagi Double and the DMM logo combines customized Stop and ITC Avant Garde Gothic Condensed.

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Glyph sets for both weights of Andromeda as shown in VGC’s 1979 catalog. Note that, due to the binding, the scan is slightly distorted at the left, making a A 1 appear narrower than they actually are.

Bordering on LTypI: Platelet for The Planets. Its designer, Conor Mangat, comments on the genesis of his debut typeface:

Platelet grew out of a 4-day workshop given to students—most with no type design experience—at CalArts in October 1992. The brief, from Phil Baines, asked for an original alphabet to be designed for a specific outdoor purpose, taking into consideration the context for usage, appropriateness and meaning, and traditional notions of good typography.

Consequently, Platelet is based directly on characters and figures found on the car license plates in California. Its original character set comprised only a single lowercase alphabet and non-lining figures, ostensibly to complement the existing all-caps characters on the plates. For its commercial release, however, the set was extended to include alternate, small capitals and other commonly used text characters – somewhat ironic considering the original brief had principally been to create specific display faces that weren’t just scaled text faces.

Cover designer Paul Marc Mitchell took advantage of the added small caps, and mixed them with the lowercase forms.

This album with the Berliner Philharmoniker’s rendition of The Planets under Simon Rattle (b. 1955) was first released as a double CD in 2006. Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite is complemented by four additional tracks by contemporary composers – thanks to Colin Matthews, Pluto finally gets acknowledged, too (just to lose its status as a proper planet the same year) – plus a video by Paul Bates.

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Warner Classics released a vinyl version with just the original suite and Matthews’ addition in 2025.

This cover is for the 1960 US reissue (EMI-Capitol) of the 1958 UK release (His Master’s Voice) of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s recording of Gustav Holst’s The Planets, conducted by Malcolm Sargent. The image doesn’t depict any of the featured planets, though. If I’m not mistaken, the shown galaxy isn’t even the Milky Way, but Messier 81, also known as Bode’s Galaxy.

The title has lowercase letters from Hellenic Wide, arranged on a bouncing baseline. While the line at the bottom is set in all-caps Stymie, “HOLST” is in Stymie’s precursor, Litho Antique. The stereo note at the top features Venus Bold Extended.

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Fonts from the Flea Market #1304

A bicolor application of Letraset’s Plaza Inline, paired with Flash Bold on an angle, for the sleeve to Mike Krüger’s 1980 single “Der Nippel”. The comedy schlager that pokes fun at nonsensical user manuals and operating instructions was a #1 hit in Germany and Austria. The song is taken from an album of the same title (and with the same cover design) that was performed live at Saalbau Witten in January 1980, recorded and mixed by Conny Plank.

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Vinyl version, front cover

In July 2016, Australian electronic group the Avalanches released their second album, Wildflower.

While the front cover has no type at all, except for a sticker with Jersey M54 for the band name, all-caps Arnold Böcklin for the album title, and ITC Franklin Gothic for additional text, the typographic party takes place on the back: it features a different style for each track on the album, with embroidered letterforms. Most of the song names are based on fonts, with or without modifications.

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Vinyl version, back cover

The Leaves Were Falling: Brush Script
Because I’m Me: handwriting?
Frankie Sinatra: Benguiat Caslon (or a digital version thereof, like Emfatick NF)
Subways: Arial Bold
Going Home: Gillies Gothic
If I Was A Folkstar: West Barnum
Colours: Electric Circus
Zap!: (similar to) Strand Midnite
The Noisy Eater: Baby Teeth
Wildflower: Arnold Böcklin
Harmony: Tango
Live A Lifetime Love: Allura
Park Music: ITC Avant Garde Gothic (?)
Livin’ Underwater (Is Somethin’ Wild): loosely based on Williamson Skidoo (?) and an unidentified script
The Wozard of Iz: Pretorian and Futura
Over the Turnstiles: Motter Femina and Turnpike or similar
Sunshine: Broadway
Light Up: lettering?
Kaleidoscopic Lovers: Commercial Script
Stepkids: Kabel Black
Saturday Night Inside Out: Druk Condensed or similar?

The headings for the sides of the vinyl version are in Windsor Extra Bold Condensed.

The art direction is credited to Chris Hopkins at Lost Art and band member Robbie Chater. Hopkins also provided design and illustration, the latter together with Emi Ueoka. Fergadelic (Fergus Purcell) did the butterfly logo. Kris Vierra took care of quilting and textiles.

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CD version, front cover

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CD version, back cover

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Inner sleeve with more octagonal caps

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Inner sleeve ft. a naïve sans and script lettering based on Kalligraphia

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Inner sleeve with more Baby Teeth and lettering similar to Williamson Skidoo. The Biz Markie photo is by David Corio.

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Sheet with five promo stickers

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Vinyl record label

Fonts from the Flea Market 1343

Two Mecanorma releases from 1969, combined in early use on the cover of a single with medleys of nine golden rock ’n’ roll oldies performed by The Dave Clark Five. The band name is in the Roller-inspired unicase face Dreamline; the bottom-heavy style used for the title is the caps-only Laurent follower Poster.

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Roxette released the greatest hits album Don’t Bore Us – Get to the Chorus! in 1995. “She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” was the third single from that album being one of the new tracks. The whole sleeve has text written in Bodoni and was designed by EMI lead designer Kjell Andersson. The B-side is a remix of “The Look”.

Rear sleeve

This purely typographic sleeve features letterforms drawn by four masters of 1970s display type: “Tommy Brown” is Design Sparkly, a thick-thin-thin multline variant of Churchward Design by Joseph Churchward. The song title is set in all-lowercase Motter Ombra by Othmar Motter. Last but not least, the sans in the middle is ITC Avant Garde Gothic by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase.

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EMI Electrola single sleeve for Blue Swede’s “Silly Milly” (B-side “Lonely Sunday Afternoon”), a follow-up to 1973’s worldwide smash hit “Hooked One A Feeling”. Prominently featuring Porker Outline by Alphabet Photosetting for the band name. There looks to be two variants. Song title is set in an outline w/inline version (giving the appearance of a lighter inner-character).

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Sleeve for the Hungarian release on Pepita, licensed through EMI. Design by János Flohr (b. 1950). From Budapest Poster Gallery:

Flohr is a graphic designer, who worked in many fields of graphic design. He studied in the 1970s under Sándor Ernyei and József Finta. Initially he worked in the Kossuth Printing House’s reproduction workshop, but he soon got work as a graphic artist. He often designed posters and other type of advertisements for Hungaroton, Hungexpo, Magyar Hirdető and Medicor. He preferred to use photos on his compositions.

Kieselbach adds that he won the Best Poster of the Year award in 1983, and that he also worked on stamps and exhibition graphics.

In 1973, amidst his studies at the Budapest College of Applied Arts, Flohr designed this single sleeve for an early single by Wizzard. The English glam rock band was formed by Roy Wood, co-founder of the Electric Light Orchestra, in 1972. The typefaces originated in England, too: the aptly named Block is the creation of John Gorham (1937–2001). It here features in a multicolor application. The monolinear rounded sans used for the catalog number and “Stereo-Mono” is Michael Chave’s Pipeline. Both were issued by Face Photosetting in London in the early 1970s. The Pepita name is shown in Colin Brignall’s Countdown (Letraset, 1965).

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Front cover

Talk Talk is of course the British band with Mark Hollis who were active between 1981 and 1991. The Party's Over was their first album, released in 1982. For the 1997 re-issues of their first four albums, the covers were slightly changed to have a matching design.

All their albums have a very stylish design with a colourful drawing and simple but recognisable lettering and layout, which was even stronger in this series of four re-issues.

For the covers of these 1997 re-issues, Univers Ultra Condensed was used. The band name and album title are in all-capitals on the front, back, and spine. The back cover have the track listing in Univers Ultra Condensed as well, but now in title case.

Univers Ultra Condensed is used even more. The inside of the booklet also has the band line-up, the band name and album title plus the year of release, and all song titles above the lyrics in all-capitals. Below each of the lyrics are the names of the people who wrote the lyrics and music, which are in title case. The text “lyrics reproduced by kind permission” is also in title case.

The drawing on the front was made by James Marsh. The original design was done by Bill Smith, the artwork for this re-issue by Rob Crane.

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Back cover and spines

Page 2 and 3 of the booklet

This record is a rare compilation of material by the British psychedelic rock band Soft Machine, released only in the Netherlands in 1969 or 1970. The reason I put this here is that the cover and the back feature a very early use of Dreamline by Mecanorma.

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Ignace Baert is a Flemish singer-songwriter born in Kortrijk in 1950. He started his career as a member of the Lilac Street Band. This single is his first release as solo artist, under the name Ignace.

The typefaces used on the sleeve both stem from Berthold’s phototype library. Tip-Top was revived from a turn-of-the-century typeface that Berthold had acquired together with the Klinkhardt foundry in 1920. Santana was a fairly new release, added in 1972 and credited to A.M. Barth and Hans Reichel. The unknown sleeve designer used exclusively lowercase characters for the title of the A-side, and exclusively capitals for that of the B-side.

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The cover of the commercial album. The version included with the novel omitted the logos and text at the top.

The lone eponymous album by The Lonely Boys is probably the only soundtrack to a novel.

Included with the first run of Mats Olsson’s 1995 novel about a 1960s band and released commercially in 1996, the album saw Per Gessle team up with Nisse Helberg to create a soundtrack to accompany the story.

Both the book jacket and the album cover use Dolce Vita to emulate a 1960s style. It is paired with several styles from the Monotype Grotesque family.

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The front of the book jacket for the hardcover release of De ensamma pojkarna by Mats Olsson, published by Bonnier Alba.

Back of the book jacket

Seven and the Ragged Tiger is the third studio album by the English new wave band Duran Duran, released on 21 November 1983 through EMI and Capitol Records. From Wikipedia:

The album cover was shot at the State Library of New South Wales during a lavish photoshoot with photographer Rebecca Blake. Sleeve designer Malcolm Garrett was flown in from the UK, as well as a live Bengal tiger from Melbourne to be pictured on both the album cover and upcoming tour programme. […] Garrett’s final sleeve design solely features the tiger's eye and a small portion of its fur. Against the caramel-coloured artwork are various logos, including the band's new DD logo, a crescent moon, a triple-X glyph and a Chinese-style antique map depicting snowy mountains and rivers […]

The typography on the front cover uses a phototype version of Banjo. This Art Deco face was designed by Maximilien Vox and first cast by French foundry Deberny & Peignot in 1930. Banjo has no lowercase, but offers narrow alternates for all letters (except I J W Æ Œ). Additional text is set in vertically stretched caps from Futura. Malcolm Garrett recalls:

It was certainly typeset, probably in Clerkenwell, London at Focus Photoset or at The Printed Word […] I think it could well be Banjo, possibly photocopied to degrade it a little. And yes, squished Futura. Ouch!! In those early days of digital typesetting we allowed ourselves to take some horrific liberties with compression and expansion! No more!

Soul Limbo is a 1968 album from the instrumental soul quartet Booker T. & the M.G.’s. The band name and title are set in Filmotype Madison on the front cover, with Trade Gothic Condensed for the track list and a question and answer test on the back.

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Back cover of a British pressing by EMI Records, featuring Univers Bold Condensed

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Talk about wrecking the type. On the cover of Trijntje Oosterhuis’s 2012 album Wrecks We Adore the text has been made by wrecking a Bodoni (Bitstream’s Bauer Bodoni looks close).

Disturbingly, the letterforms for “Wrecks We Adore” have been modified by removing strokes (R and E), reducing strokes from thick to thin (W, K, and D), eliminating contrast (O), and clipping rectangles out (S). A similar treatment is used for the singles from this album too.

I only came here for the TJ kern in “TRIJNTJE”.

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Detail from the CD booklet. The lyrics are set in Utopia.

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Another detail from the CD booklet. Photography by Marc de Groot at Witman Kleipool.

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Back cover with track list in all-caps italics

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“Knocked Out” single

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“Better Think Twice” single

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“Happiness” single

This compilation with songs recorded by The Yardbirds between 1964 and 1966 was released in 1971 by Starline, a label associated with Capitol Records/EMI. The cover was made and printed at Garrod & Lofthouse Ltd., London. The three-dimensional sans with the halftone pattern is Pluto Shaded, released by Face Photosetting in 1969.

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When you don’t have any ideas for your sleeve design and no budget for photography, you can always throw together some fancy display fonts. The uncredited designer of this Belgian single cover got away with such a somewhat uninspired approach. On the upside, they picked two interesting typefaces that haven’t seen a lot of use, both of French origin:

Tzigane by Albert Boton is a stand-alone italic with vertical contrast, in the tradition of Enric Crous-Vidal’s Paris. Mecanorma released it in 1973, with a number of alternates and ligatures, some of which were used here. The title of the B-side is in the lowercase-only Hypnos, an amorphous design with tiny circular counters, drawn by Jean Alessandrini in 1969 and issued by Hollenstein. Mecanorma adopted it in late 1973. The mix is completed with classic Brush Script, here set on an angle and with added contour (and questionable capitalization).

Record collector oopswhoops comments:

Unbearable A-side and a cool instrumental on reverse.
1974 Belgian pressing on EMI label.

See also the German cover for this single.

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