The cover uses Talon for the title and Helvetica for the subtitle and author name.

The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film is an academic book that analyzes how anxieties about biology and being organic figure in the history of the genres, using both early (e.g. The Castle of Otranto, published 1764) and then-modern (e.g. Seven, 1995) examples.

Half-title page

Title page featuring Talon for the title and Dante for the subtitle and author name. The publisher’s name is in Gill Sans Bold.

Contents

The Gathering is the eighth studio album by thrash metal band Testament, released on June 8, 1999. The cover artwork was done by English artist Dave McKean who also did the cover art for the two prior Testament studio albums Demonic and Low. The fonts in use are Margo Chase’s Portcullis and Jonathan Barnbrook’s Patriot Heavy, both released in 1997.

[More info on Discogs]

Shadowrun is a roleplaying game that was first released in 1989 by FASA Corporation, and is still published today in its current, sixth edition. For most of those editions, the primary typeface for body text has been Friz Quadrata (1966), which was also used for the game’s logo for the first and second editions (the latter from 1992), shown above.

Page from the main rulebook for the first edition of Shadowrun, from 1989, showing Friz Quadrata in both regular and bold varieties, as well as faux bold italics for the quote below the chapter title, as no true italics were available at the time.

Note the straight quote marks. FASA Corporation is known to have used Apple Macintoshes at their office, so the text was most likely laid out in columns on a computer but then pasted up for printing. (Early books often include a “Paste Up” credit; this particular one doesn’t.)

Page from the Street Samurai Catalog (1989, though this one is actually from the revised edition from 1992), a supplement for Shadowrun. Body text is Futura, with the page title in Helvetica Compressed and some small bits in Aachen.

Revised game logo for the third edition (1998), using a modified Friz Quadrata.

Front cover of New Seattle by Stephen Kenson. Originally published by FASA in 1999, this is a later edition by FanPro. All text on the cover, except for the stock number, is Tribe (1997); the stock number is Bronzo (1992). The latter was also used for the titles on the spines of most of the later third-edition books (though not on this one).

Page from New Seattle, showing the chapter title and drop capital in Badloc (1989). Body text of third-edition books was still Friz Quadrata, and even though by this time true italics of this existed, Shadowrun books kept using faux versions instead.

The statistics block below the map is in Futura Condensed, while the fictional “comments” in the text are ITC Avant Garde Gothic, as are some of the captions on the map. The circled arrow that starts off each comment is the greater-than symbol from Badloc, though set larger and lower than it would be if set at the same point size as the text itself.

Page header in New Seattle, in Tribe.

Typical page header for a third-edition Shadowrun book, also using Tribe.

From Isoletters:

This sign uses a typeface I hadn’t ever seen in use before: Edit by Margo Chase (1958–2017). It is similar to FF You Can Read Me (by @SarkyType, released in 1995), but less extreme: In FF You Can Read Me, ‘o’ is a quarter of a circle. In Edit, just one quarter was cut out.

De Platanen (“The plane trees”) is a building on Weerdjesstraat in Arnhem, the Netherlands. It was built by Geurst & Schulze in 1994–1998. Edit was released in 1997. Assuming that the sign is as old as the building, this might qualify as an early use.

Isoletters is Christopher Bergmann’s Twitter account for posting pictures of peculiar pieces of lettering and typography. His discoveries almost always come with interesting observations or commentary. If you don’t follow him yet, you’re missing out!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an American television series which ran 1997–2003. Margo Chase created the “Buffy” lettering, which was paired with Herculanum in the opening titles (designed by Thomas Cobb and George Montgomery), while the main promotional logo used Chase’s own typeface, Kruella.

The Buffy project came as a result of the logo we did for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. For a few years we got every vampire project there was. Style can be a trap, though. When I got tired of designing for vampires, it took years and lots of fast-talking to convince more conservative clients that I had breadth. They were afraid they were going to get “Buffy the Cosmetics Line,” or “Dracula the Financial Services Company” if they hired me. — Margo Chase, Women Of Design, 2008.

Kruella’s descenders were lengthened to acommodate the underlining slash.

Margo Chase died on July 22, 2017 after the plane she was piloting crashed in Apple Valley, California. Her distinctive style (sometimes self-described as “goth”) helped define a decade of graphic and type design in the mid 1990s.

The type (or perhaps lettering) on this cover came four years before the release of Box Gothic. Like many of Margo Chase’s type designs, the idea for the font may have come after the lettering in her graphic design work. She alludes to this in a 2008 Lynda video.

Chase died on July 22, 2017 after the plane she was piloting crashed in Apple Valley, California. Her distinctive style helped define a decade of graphic and type design in the mid 1990s.

The unlikely combination of Klute and Granite typefaces used together - I think for the only time - for this Batman / Judge Dredd mash-up written by the renowned Alan Grant.