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.

Delinquent Chacha is the debut novel by Indian-born writer Ved Mehta (1934–2021). First serialized in The New Yorker, it was published in book form by Harper & Row in 1966.

The first-edition dust jacket features Halftone. Originally boasting horizontally hatched (hence the name) and shaded letterforms, it’s here used in a solid version of unknown origin.

The designer specified an all-caps setting, yielding a whole lot of ball terminals. I’m afraid this might have been done out of exotism – although the resulting look has nothing to do with Indic scripts, and everything with the formal diversification in Western type design during the Victorian era.

Via a request posted by Ben Noe on Font ID.

Close-up

Detail from the showing of Halftone in Marder, Luse & Co.’s Specimen Book and Price List from 1893

Halftone appears on the spine portion, too, alongside the publisher’s name is caps from News Gothic.

Text on the inner flap is set in the Mergenthaler Linotype version of Janson, with the author’s name in Times New Roman and price info in Futura.

The title page pairs Centaur caps (top) with Janson.

Absolute Elsewhere is the fourth studio album by American death metal and progressive metal band Blood Incantation. It was recorded at Hansa Studios in Berlin and released on October 4, 2024, through Century Media.

The album artwork is credited to Steve R Dodd. There are some versions of the artwork where his signature appears. The vinyl release contains photographs taken by Nissa Lai and Julian Weigand.

Windsweep by Rodney Matthews is in use for the title on the album cover. It’s credited as “Wind Sweep”. Chances are the font in use is actually Rick W. Mueller’s digitization named Windswept MF [edit: no, it’s composed from a scans of the original alphabet, see the comments]. The typeface is also used on other promotional material such as tour posters and T-Shirts, alongside Hightower by Tobias Frere-Jones.

The band released a documentary about the making of the album on Youtube, called All Gates Open: In Search of Absolute Elsewhere. The typeface is used for the title cards of each chapter of the documentary.

[More info on Discogs]

Web poster with the dates of the Europen leg of the tour

In 1998, Paula Scher turned 50. For four years, she had been designing the posters for New York’s Public Theater to huge popular and critical acclaim. Then she decided to abandon most of the visual vocabulary she had been using since 1994 (processed imagery, wood type straight out from Rob Roy Kelly’s seminal book) and changed to black and white photography and Tobias Frere-Jones’ Hightower as the main titling typeface. All other textual elements, including the Public’s logotype set in Ann Pomeroy’s specially-digitized 19th-century Gothics, were pushed vertically along the right edge of the format, in a solution slightly reminiscent of Pierre Mendell’s work for the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich.

Indeed, Scher thought the posters looked “mysterious, cool and European”. But George C. Wolfe, the Public’s director, was more circumspect — when being shown the new direction, he exclaimed: “Paula's turning fifty! Let’s have a year of depressing posters.” (this being one of the many hilarious anecdotes told by Scher in her fine book about this spectacular collaboration).

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

Letterspaced Centaur on the dust jacket.

This 1993 translation of Ovid is luxuriously large, as is the type: 559 pages in what looks like fourteen point Bembo. Many regard the digital Bembo from that era too thin for text, but at this size it feels perfect.

The title page features Castellar and Diotima Italic.

Stanzas are interspersed with these tastefully tapering rules.

Bembo’s lowercase italic z is not approximately equal. The synthetic italic small caps could use some weight.

This book for young LEGO fans, The Book of Monsters, is using JAF Herb for the headlines alongside Centaur for the body text.

Rush.com:

Test for Echo is the band’s 16th studio album. It was recorded from January-March 1996 at the legendary Bearsville Studios in New York state (now defunct) and at Reaction Studios (also defunct) in Toronto in April 1996.

The band returned after nearly a two-year hiatus with a power and ferocity that rivals some of their earliest material. From the metallic feel of the title track, to the driving force behind “Driven” and the heavy feel of “Dog Years,” the guys beefed-up their sound and crafted a Rush record for the ’90s.

Neil recorded a majority of his drum tracks for the album using traditional grip, after receiving drum lessons from jazz instructor Freddie Gruber.

Hugh Syme, longtime designer of Rush albums, often makes interesting type choices and modifications. This stretching of Centaur’s swash ‘R’ is not one of the better ones.

Source: ecx.images-amazon.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Madonna on the album cover photography:

I have always loved to play cat and mouse with the conventional stereotypes. […] People were thinking who was I pretending to be—the Virgin Mary or the whore? These were the two extreme images of women I had known vividly, and remembered from childhood, and I wanted to play with them. I wanted to see if I can merge them together, Virgin Mary and the whore as one and all. The photo was a statement of independence, if you wanna be a virgin, you are welcome. But if you wanna be a whore, it's your fucking right to be so.

In: Madonna: The Style Book by Debbi Voller, via Wikipedia

I wonder whether the font pairing was meant to subtly echo this dichotomy on a typographic level, too — here the graceful Centaur, there the debauched Primus. The former has been advertised as “The Noblest Roman of Them All”, and praised as “unequaled” (Max Caflisch). For its first fifteen years, Centaur was exclusive to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and unavailable to ordinary printers. Primus, on the contrary, is characterized in the specimen as “rank, weighty, captivating” (kraftvoll, gewichtig, fesselnd), exhibiting the skills of the “commercial artist” (Merkantil-Lithograph). It is pitched to customers in bright red as being serviceable “for jobbing work, magazines, ads, posters, jackets, packaging, labels, records, calendars”.

Art direction: Jeffrey Kent Ayeroff, Paula Greif
Art direction, design: Jeri McManus [Heiden]
Photography: Steven Meisel (Source: Discogs)

License: All Rights Reserved.

Designed by Friedrich Berthold in a single style and first cast in 1962, Primus was available from Berthold Fototypes in the 1980s. To my knowledge, it hasn’t been digitized yet. Priamos (Brendel, 1974–1978, available from SoftMaker and TypeShop) expands the design into seven weights. Its boldest weight is not as heavy and wide as the original Primus, though.

Title page set in 22 point Centaur with 42 point Augustea Filettata (digitized as Augustea Open) from the Nebiolo Foundry.

A book of sonnets of the homesteading era in southeastern Oregon in 1912. There are eight plates, drawn and hand-colored in oil-based pencil by Norman L. McKnight. Printed by McKnight and Arlington C. Jackson of Philoxenia Press in Berkeley, California.

Colophon set in 22 point Arrighi Italic.

Whereas most indie classical record labels tend to use a period painting from some stock library as album art, Chandos in the 2000s specialised in evocative, luminous composites in blues and reds: over-the-top and a lot of fun. And appropriate for Ralph Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony, an expansive early twentieth century symphony balanced between the pensive and manic. This was the first recording of it in the more numinous original version, and Chandos clearly wanted to make a premium-rate record feel like a compelling package on which attention had been lavished. (A bit beyond what I could afford, in fact – I borrowed it from the library.) Chandos use Abadi a lot, a font which I’ve rarely seen elsewhere; here Trajan and Centaur (the latter partly in italic) complement it for larger text. The Chandos wordmark is in Antique Olive. Cover by Sean Coleman, booklet typeset by Dave Partridge.

The design of this children’s book is inspired by medieval manuscripts with their large illustrated caps. Centaur, while Renaissance inspired, gives the sense that a scribe lettered this book.

April 4, 1996

“Originally published in 1930 by Fischer whose inventory was taken over by Suhrkamp after the war. Like most of Hesse's works, the main theme of this book set in medieval Germany is the wanderer’s struggle to find himself, as well as the polar opposites. Goldmund represents art and nature and the ‘feminine mind’, while Narziss represents science and logic and God and the ‘masculine mind’.” — Bohemian Bookworm