The Lundstrom Team’s Running Free is a christian Country and gospel album released in 1969 on Canaan Records. The band name is set using Rondo, while the title underneath is in yellow Filmotype Mason

[More info on Discogs]

Footnotes issue E front cover

Footnotes is a type design periodical published biennially by La Police. The fifth issue opens with an article by Florian Hardwig on Permanent drawn by Karlgeorg Hoefer, a seemingly-forgotten German Grotesk that designers worldwide have studied-by-drawing off-grid.

Thanks to Sébastien Morlighem, we're now well aware that Pierre-Louis Vafflard cut types for the Didot dynasty, beautiful ones.

The third essay, from the One-off series – contextual type projects from graphic designers – sheds some light on the Belgian figure of Fernand Baudin through a digital re-enactment of his many (hand)writings by Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé.

The last contribution overlaps theory with practise, past with present. A designer’s journey, from the educational binder of Swiss teacher Walter Käch full of lessons to digital redrawings of his template letterforms by Dinamo and Omnigroup (ABC Walter Neue and ABC Walter Alte).

To conclude, the traditional last page entitled Proofs showcases in-progress typefaces from the contributors: Mercator (Laurenz Brunner), Zero, Ninety, Linus (Charles Mazé), LP Jung, Olympia Manuscript No. 4 (Mathieu Christe), Walter Compressed, Slab, Mono (Dinamo, Omnigroup), and Didot Vafflard and Vafflard (Dávid Molnár).

As with every issue, each article is typeset with the related typeface(s), some in-progress and unreleased. The generous iconography also tries to pleasantly surprise the reader with unpublished material.

Footnotes issue E: article 19

Footnotes issue E: article 19: This spread showcases six digital versions of Permanent drawn by (from left to right): Laurenz Brunner, Fabian Harb, Mathieu Christe, Lorenzo Mason, Connor Davenport, Alberto Malossi.

Footnotes issue E: article 20

Footnotes issue E: article 21

Footnotes issue E: article 22

Footnotes issue E: Proofs: On the left a real offset printing testing space to the authors and previously unseen designs to the readers. On the right, the index to navigate the dense content.

Groovin’ with the Soulful Strings, Cadet LPS-796, 1967. Photography by Don S. Bronstein. [More info on Discogs]

From Wikipedia:

The Soulful Strings were an American soul-jazz instrumental group formed in Chicago in 1966. Predominantly a studio band, the project was created and led by Richard Evans, a staff producer and musical arranger with the Chess Records subsidiary Cadet Records. […] Between 1966 and 1971, the Soulful Strings released six studio albums, all recorded at Chess’s Ter Mar Studios, and one live album.

With the excption of the 1966 debut, Paint It Black, and the last album from 1970, The Soulful Strings Play Gamble-Huff, all albums feature Bulletin Script Two for the cover typography in one form or another. The left-leaning, bottom-heavy script is used in all caps, with various amounts of stretching. In most cases, the secondary typeface is News Gothic (see the captions for exceptions). Jerry Griffith is credited with the design of all shown covers.

Another Exposure, Cadet LPS-805, 1968. Photography by Ruyell Ho. [More info on Discogs]

The Magic of Christmas, Cadet LPS-814, 1968. Photography by Ray Klein. [More info on Discogs] The song names are set in News Gothic Extended.

The Soulful Strings in Concert, Cadet LPS-820, 1969. Photography by Jerry Griffith. [More info on Discogs] The small type again uses News Gothic Extended.

String Fever, Cadet LPS-834, 1969. Photography by Jerry Griffith. [More info on Discogs] The second line (in purple) is in Mercator Cursief, the italic style of Mercator. Amsterdam Continental integrated this typeface into the Standard series – the export name of Akzidenz-Grotesk – and sold it in the US as Standard Italic. See this post on FontID.co for more information.

Promises is the debut album of the Garrick Sextet led by British jazz pianist, band leader and composer Michael Garrick (1933–2011). The record was released in 1965 by Argo Records, a label absorbed by Decca Records in 1957.

The unknown designer of the front cover combined a powerful red/black color combination with five irregular shapes showing the six band members in black-and-white photographs. The top left shape is simultaneously a picture frame and the capital P – the initial capital of the album title. It is set on an angle, using Typefoundry Amsterdam’s Flambard, with the last two letters reversed out of a photograph showing Michael Garrick, and ending in an EndcaP. The band name is somewhat inconspicuously tucked away between the bottom two pictures. The gap between the top two images offers ample room for typography, though. Perhaps the band name was positioned right there in an earlier version of the design?

The back cover is set in three weights of Univers.

[More info on Discogs]

Vouwblaadjes (“folding leaves”) is the Dutch term for sheets of colored paper that typically come in square format of 10×10 cm. They are used for handicrafts like origami, by kindergarten and school kids as well as by older knutselaars.

This package of 100 assorted sheets is undated, but the fonts in use tell us it must be from after 1932: that’s when Energos, the bold script typeface, was first cast.

Introva was a publisher of children’s books, games and toys active (at least) between the 1940s and 1960s. The company also did business as Introva Fröbel: it distributed products associated with Fröbel’s educational ideas. According to Wikipedia, Fröbel influenced modern origami:

When Japan opened its borders in the 1860s, as part of a modernization strategy, they imported Fröbel’s Kindergarten system—and with it, German ideas about paperfolding. This included the ban on cuts, and the starting shape of a bicolored square. These ideas, and some of the European folding repertoire, were integrated into the Japanese tradition.

The sans is Nobel (1929), here used in two weights. The bold caps mix glyphs with blunt and pointed apexes, compare A and M vs. N. The latter forms were available on request only.

“Gives greater cachet” – ad by furniture manufacturer Thonet in an issue of De 8 en Opbouw from October 1937, a bimonthly journal jointly issued by the architecture groups De 8 in Amsterdam and Opbouw in Rotterdam.

In 1927, Lettergieterij „Amsterdam” voorheen N. Tetterode, or Typefoundry Amsterdam, started to work together with the Berthold foundry in Berlin. The best-known fruit of this partnership probably is Nobel, De Roos’s adaptation of Berthold-Grotesk. The two foundries also exchanged a number of designs: Berthold received Erasmus-Mediaeval (as Oranien-Mediäval) and Hollandse Mediaeval (as Holländische Mediäval), and in return Amsterdam could distribute Lo-Schrift (as Nero), Tango-Antiqua (as Luna), City (as Métro), and Plastica (as Duplex). Shown here is Sirene, which was Amsterdam’s name for Signal.

Less than three years after this ad was published, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands, and the typographic cooperation came to an abrupt end.

Fabrikzeitung is a magazine for cultural, social and political issues; it is published by Rote Fabrik (Red Factory), a former silk weaving facility in the Wollishofen neighbourhood of Zürich, Switzerland. Since 1980, it is used as a music venue and cultural centre. The newspaper was first published in 1984 and is published ten times a year.

In addition to the respective monothematic topics, the magazine provides information about the events at Rote Fabrik. Approximately 3,500 print copies are being distributed in Switzerland, in bookshops and via subscribers, mostly in German-speaking countries. Since 2015, the texts are additionally being published on fabrikzeitung.ch where they can be read online. The studio Huber/Sterzinger has been in charge of the design and editorial tasks since 2008.

Issue 374 “Der radikale Katalog” is typeset in LL Catalogue, and Issue 379 “Gegen Aktion” is one of the first uses of LL Ruder Plakat VIP, both from Lineto, paired with Mercator and Times New Roman Seven.

Issue 374, “Der radikale Katalog”:

The search window, whether in a library or archival catalog, opens doors and gates to new worlds for us. But what we often don't think about when typing in search terms is that this window is designed, built, and maintained […]

Issue 379, “Gegen Aktion”:

Significant social and political events in recent years – digitization, climate change, pandemics and war – have led many people to a new awareness of political action and resistance. From the point of view of the existing bourgeois order, the willingness to work for a change in society through activism and in social movements is and was often perceived as a threat to the status quo […]

Anatole Couteau, designer of LL Ruder Plakat, enjoying his copy of Fabrikzeitung.

Front cover of Channel 1, released June 2000

Channel is a series of leftfield, electro and electroclash music compilation mixes released between 2000 to 2005. The channels range from one to four and feature a roster of British and international artists in a tracklist of 10 to 15 tracks, including Yello, LCD Soundsystem, Lopazz, and others.

Trevor Jackson, the founder of the now-defunct “highly acclaimed” Output Recordings (1996–2006), was known for designing the covers himself in the independent label’s art director role.

The first in this installment (released in June 2000) features a hot pink background (except fluorescent orange in the 2005 copies, not pictured) and text set in Berthold’s Akzidenz-Grotesk Bold, which was also used for the CD-R version (not pictured) released with Source UK, a tradename of the French label Source, but in a background of silver filled on the cover and the text being aligned on the centre above.

However, from Channel 2 to Channel 4, the band names on the front and track names on the back are a circus maelstrom of fonts with various backgrounds, including monochrome in two variants (one being white and black, the second being black on white) and metallic gold (pictured) and metallic silver (not pictured).

These fonts include classics from the metal type era as well as the 1970s/80s dry-transfer and phototypesetting years (including designs by ITC, Letraset, Mecanorma, VGC, Fotostar/Fascimile Fonts, and Photo-Lettering) in the styles of Art Deco, Victorian, Art Nouveau, geometric, etc. Note especially the early use of Tank by Canadian type designer Ray Larabie (in the 2004 compilation cover which by the way was possibly inspired by ITC Machine from 1970) and Boback from Nathan Williams’ Baseline Fonts foundry (not released until 2006) [edit: it’s probably the earlier Serifedsans].

Back cover, in left-aligned text and two columns

Channel Two, released April 2003: Centaur (Bruce Rogers, Monotype, 1928), Cooper Black (Oswald Bruce Cooper, Barnhart Brothers and Spindler, 1922), ITC Symbol (Aldo Novarese, 1984), Abbot Old Style (Joseph W. Phinney, ATF, 1901), Albertus (Berthold Wolpe, Monotype, 1936), Cottonwood (Barbara Lind et al., Adobe, 1989), Old English (Monotype, an adaptation of ATF Cloister Black, 1904), Memphis Bold (Rudolf Wolf, 1931), Studio (Dick Dooijes and Dolf Overbeek, Amsterdam Type Foundry, 1946), Too Much Shadow (Bill Seifert, VGC, 1974), Karnak Bold Condensed (Robert Hunter Middleton, Ludlow, 1931), Boback (Baseline Fonts, released ca. 2006, documented early use of an Alternate Gothic with serifs on the bottom) [edit: it’s probably the earlier Serifedsans], Helvetica Condensed (outlined, Stempel/Linotype), ITC Avant Garde Gothic (Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase, 1970) and Hamilton (Font Bureau, 1993).

Back cover

Channel 3, released in June 2004 (pictured behind is the pink cover): Agraphicus (VGC before 1982, digitized by WSI in 1996 as Arruba), Tank (Ray Larabie of Typodermic, 2004 – the year this album was released in), ITC Busorama (Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase, the creators of Avant Garde Gothic, 1970), Buxom (Bob Trogman of Fotostar/Fascimile, 1975), ITC Pioneer (Ronné Bonder, 1970), ITC Serif Gothic (Herb Lubalin and Tony Di Spigna, 1972), a condensed sans (probably a bolder style of FF Meta or similar), Shatter (Vic Carless, Letraset, 1973), Futura Black (Paul Renner, Bauer, 1929), Clarendon (Hermann Eidenbenz, Haas, 1953), Umbra (Robert H. Middleton, Ludlow, 1932), ITC American Typewriter Light (Tony Stan and Joel Kaden, 1974), and Raphael (Central Type Foundry, 1885)

Back cover with copyright and remix text in Helvetica (Max Miedinger, Haas, 1957)

Example spread of booklet that comes with the tracklist

Channel 4, released in September 2005: Fiorello (Photo-Lettering Inc., before 1965), Futura Light (Paul Renner, Bauer, 1927), Blackline (Wolf Magin, Berthold, 1973), Shotgun (J. Looney, VGC, 1972), ITC Busorama (see Channel 3 for info, here used with the asymmetrical A), ITC Zapf International (Hermann Zapf, 1977), Isabella (Herman Ihlenburg; MacKellar, Smiths and Jordan; 1892), Novel Gothic (shaded variant as seen in Solotype’s 3-D and Shaded Alphabets; Charles H. Becker and Morris F. Benton, ATF, 1928), Crypt, Sauce (unknown), University Roman (Letraset, 1972), Cooper Black (outlined variant) and ITC Serif Gothic Bold.

Back cover

Spine

Fonts from the Flea Market #1251

This isn’t a record cover, as one might suspect. it’s rather a sleeve holding three reels with a total of 21 three dimension pictures of the Canary Islands, to be viewed in the View-Master. From Wikipedia:

View-Master is the trademark name of a line of special-format stereoscopes and corresponding View-Master “reels”, which are thin cardboard disks containing seven Stereoscopic 3-D pairs of small transparent color photographs on film. It was originally manufactured and sold by Sawyer's.

The View-Master system was introduced in 1939, four years after the advent of Kodachrome color film made the use of small, high-quality photographic color images practical. Tourist attraction and travel views predominated in View-Master's early lists of reels, most of which were meant to be of interest to users of all ages. Most current View-Master reels are intended for children.

Shown here is View-Master series C 260 as produced in Belgium, featuring Rondo for the title.

The View-Master logo appears to be based on Phenix, with added shadow. The version on the inner sleeves stays closer to the forms of the metal typeface than the one on the cover, cf. E and S.

Logo for Sawyer’s Inc.’s View-Master stereoscopic viewing system, ca. 1950s. This version has heavier strokes than Phenix.

Studio in use for the cover of Dawn In A Duck Blind. A Guide to the Calls of Waterfowl. The 10″ record was released by Cornell University Records, a division of Cornell University Press.

Dolf Overbeek’s typeface was first issued by the Typefoundry Amsterdam in 1946. With its organic strokes, it goes well together with the reed and blades. The subtitle proves that Studio looks good in all-caps settings, too. Note how some words are subtly scaled down to let the important ones come to the fore. The cover illustration is by William C. Dilger (1923–2015), director of research at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and author of Finding Out About Birds, The Behaviour of Lovebirds, and The Loss of Teeth in Birds, among many other publications.

A record of the same title was issued with a different cover design by Houghton Mifflin in 1963. That edition came with a 28-page book with “identification drawings by Roger Tory Peterson, numerous color photos, black-and-white photos, waterfowl descriptions, and more. […] One side has narration of various waterfowl heard in duck blind at dawn, and the other side being straight mixture of waterfowl sounds.”

Via Jim’s Record Barn.

Studio (Lettergieterij Amsterdam, 1946) in use on Norman Graber’s cover design for Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq D'Or suite – known as Золотой петушок (Zolotoy petushok) in Russian and as The Golden Cockerel in English – and popular concert music, Plymouth Records (no date). This recording by the Viennese Symphonic Orchestra was first released in 1952 with a different cover designed by Curt John Witt.

From Wikipedia:

The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (1948) is a short, satirical novel by British novelist Evelyn Waugh about the funeral business in Los Angeles, the British expatriate community in Hollywood, and the film industry.

The paperback edition published by Dell Books in 1961 (LB146) comes with cover art by Sheilah Beckett (1913–2013), “the first female artist hired to work at New York’s Charles E. Cooper Studio.” [illustrationhistory.org]

Studio is paired with small caps from Amsterdamer Garamont or similar.

Het Frame-boekje en Het Bandenboekje (“The Frame Booklet” and “The Tyre Booklet”) are two instructional booklets for bicycle repair and construction, issued by the Centraal Bureau voor den Rijwielhandel (“Central Office for Bicycle Trade”) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Both booklets have a cover printed on “elephant skin” paper, with titles set in Egmont. The interior uses Romana, assisted by Nobel and a handful of other typefaces in the advertisement section in the back of the booklets.

The booklets are not dated, but some of the ads mention both what they have on offer currently, and what they will have in stock once the war is over. This makes it likely that the books were issued between the winter of 1944 (when half of the Netherlands were liberated from the Nazi occupation) and the end of WWII in the Netherlands on May 5, 1945.

Printed by Drukkerij De Globe, Amsterdam

Title page. Het Frame-boekje came with a paper ruler (centimeters and inches). “Linophile” is obviously a pseudonym.

Page from Het Bandenboekje. Note that the printer uses a few habits that later went out of fashion: subheadings are right-aligned within the text block; the printers used spacing for emphasis instead of italics; they used double quotes where nowadays single quotes are the custom. In addition, the opening quotes are placed on the baseline, a habit that has disappeared in the Netherlands altogether, with exception of a few newspapers and institutes that still favor this style.

Spread from Het Frameboekje, with page numbers on top of the page; right-aligned subheads, and tables placed center-aligned.

Instructional illustration, showing the use of Bahr’s Normograph for lettering. From Typotheque:

The Normograph, for example, invented by vocational school teacher Georg Bahr, was patented in Germany in 1909 and in America in 1912. Bahr’s Normograph did not contain a full character set, but only a few elementary shapes — stems, arms, curve segments, diagonals — that needed to be combined into letters and numerals.

Advertisement for Cyclia, with a few weights and sizes of Nobel. “We are happy to advise you about purchasing...” followed by a list of bicycle parts (this is also a modest suggestion for type designers looking for Dutch words for type specimens). “Handelsonderneming” uses Monoline Script.

Esteka Achterlichten (“Esteka Rear Lights”); Esteka is probably a phonetic acronym for S.T.K.

Advertisements; spread from Het Bandenboekje. In contrast to the body text, the ad on the right hand page does use Romana Italic. The “Wereld” advertisement says: “The end of the war marks a new era for the world / De Wereld”.

Advertisement for wooden wheels: “In normal times, I should not belong in this booklet. However, in these times, the bicycle repair gentlemen cannot do without me if they want to keep their trade on track”. The ad below, using Gill Sans and Beton, mentions both current service (in war time) and future stock (in time of peace).

Ad for steel bullets, using Monoline Script and Breite halbfette Grotesk; the bottom advertisement for ‘raw material’ pairs Monoline Script with Egmont.

“Beautiful Recordings in Spectacular Stereophonic Sound. Performed by the Edward Carrington Chorale.” GA-223-SD. Released by Grand Award Records in 1958. Cover painting by Arthur Shilstone (b. 1922).

The title is set in Flambard (1954) by Dick Dooijes, the byline in Venus Extended. The “Grand Award” logo appears to be a beefed-up Caslon 540 Italic, with roman capitals.

Vol. 1 was a T.M.C production released in 1971 on Map Records. No sleeve designer credited. The typeface appears to be a version of Plantin Bold in all caps.

The Montague Arms is a music and comedy venue in south east London. In the 1970s, The Montague Arms published a series of recordings by Jimmy Jones, Peter London, and Peter Hoyle — Live At The Montague Arms. The cover designs of Volumes Two to Four are credited to Ed. Berry.

Vol. Two (1972) uses Imre Reiner’s Matura.

The psychedelic cover of Vol. Three (1972) features yellow caps from Mania Contour.

It gets weirder: Vol. Four (1973) shows Flambard set on a path between photos, with bouncing baseline.

“This poster informs you that the sixth edition of Graphéine starts on Thursday, 6 November, and ends on Saturday, 6 December 2014 […]”

Event identity for the Graphéine festival, dedicated to the contemporary practices of graphic arts and organized by the Pinkpong network, an association of art centers in the Toulouse region. The self-referential, purely typographic campaign uses a single typeface in one size. It is Adams Bold, a revival of Dick Dooijes’ Flambard (Amsterdam, 1954).

This booklet is promoting the constructed language Esperanto in Belgium and The Netherlands. Esperanto was invented by the Polish writer, L.L. Zamenhof. He grew up fascinated by the idea of a world without war and believed that this could happen with the help of a new international auxiliary language, which he first developed in 1873 while still in school.

This booklet was made by Frits Faulhaber and Th. Buis (ed.) and was published in 1935. You can notice typographical characteristics from Bauhaus and De Stijl. These artistic movements aspired pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour — which aligns with the purpose of Esperanto as a universal language.

The language is still in use today. Up to 2,000,000 people worldwide, to varying degrees, speak Esperanto. In 2012, Google Translate added Esperanto as its 64th language. (Wikipedia)

Ad in Drukkers Weekblad (Printers’ Weekly), Christmas edition 1938, presenting the three binding methods offered by H. van Rijmenam’s bookbindery, Oranjelaan 21, The Hague.