Sylvia is a 1976 album by the Charfauros Brothers, a Chamoru/Chamorro musical group from Guam. The album was released by Charfauros Brothers Productions. The title is in Filmotype Zingo with quotation marks, and the band name is in Century Expanded

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Front cover featuring the Vandellas in a wheat field; above them is a rainbow with the group’s name, album title and featured tracks overlaid.

Title (in white) set in Bulletin Script #2; group name and featured tracks (both in black) set in Century Expanded Bold.

Hi, gay! Happy pridem’th!

Bulletin Script Two in prominent usage du homosexuelles on the cover of Natural Resources, the seventh studio album by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.

The cover was designed by Curtis McNair and Tom Schlesinger, with photography by Jim Hendin.

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Back cover, also featuring the group name and album title.

Credits (regular) and track list (bold) set in Univers. As the images used are of a British pressing, additional information (added by distributor EMI Records) are also set in Univers. “File under POPULAR : Pop Groups” set in Gill Sans.

From Wikipedia:

At Carnegie Hall is a jazz live album by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. It was recorded at the famed Carnegie Hall in New York City on Friday, February 22, 1963. Critic Thom Jurek described it as “one of the great live jazz albums of the 1960s” […]

The title is rendered in tight-not-touching caps from Fiedler Gothic, a typeface drawn by Hal Fiedler for Photo-Lettering not too long before the album’s release. It’s shown in PLINC’s 1965 catalog in a range of widths and weights (see further below), with various alternates. Its use on this album cover inspired Austrian type designer David Einwaller to draw a digital interpretation which he released in 2020 as Brubeck.

With George Simon’s liner notes printed on the front (in Century Expanded), this album represents an addition to our “text on cover” tag.

Horn/Griner is credited for the cover photo. Steve Horn and Norm Griner started out in 1959 as a graphic design firm and ventured into photography a little later. It’s unclear whether they had a hand in the album’s typography as well. If not, it probably was done in-house at Columbia Records, under the supervision of John Berg who in 1961 was appointed art director for packaging design.

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Fiedler Gothic came in many styles. Shown here is an overview of the Semi-concensed and Expanded widths (in fact, the Condensed and normal weights, photographically extended), each in five weights.

First edition (hardcover) by Bartholomew House, 1967, illustrated by Bill Wenzell. The illustrations on the front of jacket are by Roy E. LaGrone. Secondary typefaces include Craw Clarendon Condensed, Filmotype Harmony (or Photo-Lettering’s copy, Almadine Script), and Century Expanded Italic.

Coffee Tea or Me? was advertised as “the uninhibited memoirs of two airline stewardesses”, and credited to Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones. In fact, it was ghost-written by Donald Bain. The 1967 hardcover dust jacket features Caruso Roxy, set in all caps. The same typeface was also used for the paperback cover, now bigger and in mixed case, as well as for the three sequels published until 1975. In 1973, the book was made into a film.

Caruso Roxy is a typeface that we’ve come to associate with the swinging 60s.

Coffee Tea or Me? The uninhibited memoirs of two airline stewardesses. First Bantam edition (paperback), November 1968 with cover art by Bill Wenzel and small text in all-caps News Gothic.

The Coffee Tea or Me Girls’ ’Round the World Diary. First edition (hardcover) by Grosset & Dunlap, 1970. The multilingual toasts are stereotypically added in more or less fitting typefaces: Peignot (French), Post-Antiqua (Hebrew), Cloister Black (German), Centaur (Spanish), Akzidenz-Grotesk Extended (Scandinavian), Jessen-Schrift (Greek), Americana (English), Mandarin (Japanese), and Century Schoolbook (Italian).

Jacket and cover with spine lettering

The Coffee Tea or Me Girls’ ’Round the World Diary. Paperback edition by Bantam Books, April 1971, with small type in Alternate Gothic.

The Coffee Tea Or Me Girls: Lay it On The Line, Bantam Books, 1973. The fat years are over: the main typeface now is Caruso Roxy’s light weight. Secondary text is in italic caps from Caledonia.

The Coffee Tea Or Me Girls Get Away From It All, Bantam Books, 1975, with Helvetica used for the text in red.

Western Birds. An Audubon Handbook by John Farrand Jr. helps readers identify “the over 460 species of birds regularly found east of the Rockies.” It is a lengthy yet compact softcover of 416 pages, 1,314 photographs, and 100,000 words. Published in 1988 by McGraw-Hill, Western Birds is one of several books Massimo Vignelli designed for the National Audubon Society.

The book’s page layouts are built upon a simple two column grid subdivided into ten modules. All text is flush left. Paragraphs are not indented nor are they separated by an empty line. This creates a sharp, mostly uniform line on the left edge of text columns. Their right edge, in contrast, is particularly ragged due to hyphenation being dispensed with all together. Although the lack of paragraph indents and spacing and of hyphenation is somewhat unusual for such a text-heavy book, it is a hallmark of books designed by Vignelli and many of his modernist peers.

The book was typeset by Dix Type in Century Expanded, one of Vignelli’s preferred typefaces. As Vignelli was wont to do, the italic is used liberally throughout. The title on the title page is kerned in Vignelli’s signature tight-not-touching style. Two subsequent section headings are kerned in the same way but the kerning (or, rather, lack thereof) of the rest of text leaves much to be desired. The spacing between the characters of the body text is much more open than the tight headings – just as one would hope and expect. The problem, however, is that for the rest of the book, in both the body and in headings, many letters have awkward gaps yawning between them.

The tightly kerned title with the author’s unkerned name below.

A rare case in Vignelli’s work where text appears to be evenly spaced between rules. Usually when using rules, Vignelli would set the text closer to the rule above than to the one below, creating the impression that text is hung from the rule above. In his Canon, he mentions this as a “small but important detail.” 

One of 168 black-and-white drawings

On pages where rules are separated by images or multiple lines of text, the text does look as if it is hung from the rule above.

No elements of the layouts for recto and verso pages are mirrored. Instead, each page is uniformly designed as if it was a verso page with the page number always placed on a page’s bottom left.

A quite obvious example of the book’s kerning issues

One of three headings where text is kerned in a manner one would expect from a Vignelli-designed book.

The first page of the Index is numbered but all subsequent pages are not.

Back cover with description in italic. The ISBN is added in OCR-A.

Written by Edward Gibbon in 1776–1789, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has been published in many editions. This Washington Square Press boxed set from 1962 is very America in the early ’60s: the colors, the informal illustration, and the type – a casual hand-drawn boxy sans with a subtle swelling at the ends, Microflair.

Compare to the 1970s Modern Library edition which also represents its time quite well.

A teach-yourself-to-play-keyboard book that came with a Baldwin Orga-sonic electric organ. It has a Mississippi Riverboat theme throughout and uses 19th-century typefaces to match.

This Christmas-themed compilation album with twelve tracks from eight of their artists was released by Coral Records in 1958.

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The headline face on the back cover is worth a closer look: it’s Ornata. The ornamented roman was designed by Oskar H. W. Hadank and cut as a metal typeface in 14 (!) sizes by the Klingspor foundry.

Rosenblum Chicamakomiko in early use for Folksy Nina, released by Colpix Records in 1964. The album by Nina Simone “includes live tracks recorded on April 12, 1963, at Carnegie Hall. The previous album, Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall (1963) uses songs from the same concert.” [Wikipedia]

Chicamakomiko was drawn by Richard Rosenblum and shown by Photo-Lettering in 1964, together with an outlined variant named Rosenblum Glockenheimer. Susana Carvalho digitized and extended the lively design in 2011. First made available from (the now defunct) photolettering.com around 2015, it’s now available from House Industries, as Plinc Chicamakomiko.

Found by John, who is currently tracking down Uses for some of the ten typefaces designed by Rosenblum.

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For the stereo release, the art was moved down to make space for “Stereo” (in Century Expanded Bold) and the catalog number (in News Gothic).

This split album released by Colpix Records in 1964 contains six early songs by the Chad Mitchell Trio on the A-side and six by the Gatemen on the B-side. The name of the former, a vocal group formed in 1958 in Spokane, Washington, is shown in Rosenblum Zetzinkup. This animated semi-slab with contour was drawn by Richard Rosenblum and added to Photo-Lettering’s library shorty before.

Found by John, who is currently tracking down Uses for some of the ten typefaces designed by Rosenblum.

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Lots of all-caps Romanesque for the cover of Signet W4479, 1970. Originally designed by Herman Ihlenburg in 1874 for MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan, the bold condensed face with long serifs, split shade and decorative tendrils was revived by Photo-Lettering by 1960.

About the book, from Wikipedia:

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John Fowles. The plot explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love. The novel builds on Fowles’s authority in Victorian literature, both following and critiquing many of the conventions of period novels.

The book was the author's third, after The Collector (1963), and The Magus (1965). […]

The novel was adapted as a 1981 film, written by playwright Harold Pinter and directed by Karel Reisz. The film starred Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.

First edition cover. Limited edition of 300 copies signed by Bukowski, bound in publisher’s brown paper covered boards over blue-gray corduroy backstrip. The cover drawing is by the author.

What a joy and delight it is find fine books covers using Lydian. The first edition of Charles Bukowski’s Women uses Lydian for author and title on the cover (in all caps, naturally). And also, at least judging by photos found on Abebooks, Lydian is used for the interior title page, with the title in red, repeated several times above in gold.

There is no doubt that choosing Lydian for a book cover in the 1970s was unusual. Matthijs notes a gap after the 1960s and this 1978 cover may be an exception that proves the rule, or merely soften the exact boundaries of Matthijs’s void.

I haven’t read the book, but Wikipedia attests that “One of the first women featured in the book [...] is a character named Lydia”, so this may qualify as an LTypI.

Title page. Secondary typefaces are Century Expanded (left) and Trump-Mediäval (publisher credit).

A straight look on the title page, from a paperback edition

The colophon is set in Janson Text.

Signed limited deluxe edition

Cover of the second edition (1979)

Angel of the Morning is a 1968 album by Percy Faith released on Columbia Records. The typeface used for the title and song list is Century Expanded Italic. No designer is credited. The cover photography is by Walter Swarthout.

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Front cover of the 5th printing, February 1968

From Wikipedia:

On Aggression (German: Das sogenannte Böse. Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression, “So-called Evil: on the natural history of aggression”) is a 1963 book by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz; it was translated into English in 1966. As he writes in the prologue, “the subject of this book is aggression, that is to say the fighting instinct in beast and man which is directed against members of the same species.”

The book was reviewed many times, both positively and negatively, by biologists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts and others. Much criticism was directed at Lorenz's extension of his findings on non-human animals to humans.

The first Bantam Books edition was published in 1967, featuring Tension for the title.

Back cover of the 5th printing, February 1968. The secondary typefaces are Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed – heer with sign painters’ quotes – and Century Expanded.

Front cover of the 10th printing, after March 1970. The secondary typefaces here are regular-wide Franklin Gothic and Caledonia, both in all caps.

Back cover of the 10th printing, after March 1970

Cibo Matto was an American alternative rock band formed by Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori in New York City in 1994. Their music was influenced by trip hop and shibuya-kei.

Pom Pom: The Essential Cibo Matto is an album released in 2007 as a compilation of their greatest hits. For the band name on the cover, Namaiki used Missionary, an early 1990s design by Miles Newlyn, released with Emigre. The title is shown in lowercase Tango, with “The Essential Cibo Matto” set in tracked Bickham Script. All other text uses Century Oldstyle.

The album includes many pages of playful design, using mostly a red and white color palette. Exploring the digitized copy at the internet Archive, you can find these illustrations and collages.

[More info on Discogs]

Volume one

From Wikipedia:

Josephine Mutzenbacher or The Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself (German: Josefine Mutzenbacher oder Die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt) is an erotic novel first published anonymously in Vienna, Austria, in 1906. The novel is famous in the German-speaking world, having been in print in both German and English for over 100 years and sold over 3 million copies, becoming an erotic bestseller.

Although no author claimed responsibility for the work, it was originally attributed to either Felix Salten or Arthur Schnitzler by the librarians at the University of Vienna. Today, critics, scholars, academics and the Austrian Government designate Salten as the sole author of the "pornographic classic".

This edition was published in 1972 by Brandon Books, a subsidiary of Parliament News, Inc. Volume one contains an English translation of the original novel, while volume two contains a translation of a sequel written by a different author, originally titled Meine 365 Liebhaber.

The title combines Makart with oblique Bookman. The author attribution, as well as the volume number, publisher name, serial number and price, use Trade Gothic. The other credits use italic Century Expanded.

Volume two

Meet the Beatles! is the first U.S. album by The Beatles on Capitol Records, released on January 20, 1964. This album served as the American introduction to the band, featuring hits like “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, “I Saw Her Standing There”, and “All My Loving”. Unlike its UK counterpart, With the Beatles, this release emphasized original compositions by Lennon–McCartney and marks the beginning of Beatlemania in the United States.

The album cover features the now iconic half-lit portrait of the band, photographed by Robert Freeman. The typography prominently uses Venus Extended. The iconic design became one of the most recognizable album covers of the 1960s.

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The back cover additionally features various styles from News Gothic and a band description in Century Expanded.

Japanese pressing on Odeon Records

A Night at the Beachcomber by guitar virtuoso John Adomono was recorded at the International Market Place, Honolulu, Hawaii, and released by Decca Records in 1961. From his bio at Discogs:

“John played alone, but most people thought there were five or six players on his records,” remembers Lu Woolley, his promoter and booking agent. “People were absolutely wowed by him. Nobody played like him.”

Adomono’s secret weapon was the Ecco-Fonic, a cutting-edge tape-echo machine. Alongside DeArmond’s Tremolo Control, it was one of the first stand-alone effects for the guitars and Adomono was one of the early testers, promoters, and endorsers.

On the uncredited cover, Adomono’s name is shown in red letters from the fett weight of Volta. The wide Clarendon with the superb figure–ground organization was designed by Konrad F. Bauer and Walter Baum and first cast by Bauer in 1956. The typeface used for “Guitarist fantastique” has German roots, too: it’s Berthold’s Akzidenz-Grotesk, known in the US under the name Standard. The bold condensed style is Akzidenz-Grotesk extra, added to the family by Günter Gerhard Lange in 1958.

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Filmotype Tailor is used in lowercase for the title while Vera Lynn’s name begins with a capital letters. The smaller text, “with Tony Osborne and his Orchestra”, is set in Century Expanded Italic.

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Arriba Huentitán is an album by Mexican singer Vicente Fernández (1940–2021) that features a variety of ranchera songs.

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