Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Alan Mays and tagged with “belgian”, “broadgauge”, “glyptic shaded”, “old style extended”, “fashion”, “cloister”, and “french clarendon shaded”. License: All Rights Reserved.

This is a nineteenth-century advertising trade card for John P. Schaum, gas fitter and plumber, whose business was located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The other side of the card features an illustration with a rabbit and flowers.

Chandeliers, Coal Oil Lamps, and Gas Fixtures.
Stoves, Heaters, and Ranges.
Gas Fitting and Plumbing.
John P. Schaum,
No. 24 South Queen Street, Lancaster, Pa.

The featured typefaces include Belgian (Bruce, 1867) and Fashion (Farmer, 1876). Most of the typefaces come from the catalog of MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan in Philadelphia. This includes Broadgauge (a foundry version of a design previously seen in wood as Antique Tuscan Extended, 1869) French Clarendon Shaded (1871), Cloister (1873), Glyptic Shaded, Caxtonian (both 1878), and Kitcat (1883). The grot on the back is a version of a design that was known in Germany as Moderne Steinschrift.

Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Alan Mays and tagged with “fashion”, “kitcat”, “caxtonian” and “french clarendon shaded”. License: All Rights Reserved.

Philadelphian in use for a dixieland album by Lawrence Welk (1903–1992), released by Coral Records in 1957 or 1958. The roman with mid-stem spurs and contour was designed by Herman Ihlenburg and patented by MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan in 1867. The version used here with enlarged initials and a two-color fill is probably the adaptation by Photo-Lettering, initially shown under the name Mr. Currier & Mr. Ives. In 2020, Michael Hagemann of FontMesa made a digital revival.

[More info on Discogs]

Detail

Book jacket (front), Albert A. Knopf edition [More info on ISFDB]

Michael Crichton’s historical novel about the Great Gold Robbery of 1855 was first published in 1975, by Jonathan Cape in the United Kingdom, and by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States.

The typography for the book cover and the title page of both editions explores the obvious Western theme, with a different typeface for each line, including a shaded 19th-century slab named Gold Rush, a bold Didone, two Clarendons, and a “railroad slab” (all-caps Figaro) for “Train”.

While Cape used this setup for the dust jacket, too (design by Leigh Taylor), Paul Bacon fancied something else for Knopf’s version, and went with a typeface that has stylistic roots in the 1890s: Hawthorn (Letraset, 1968) is a bolder rendition of De Vinne Condensed.

Book jacket, Jonathan Cape edition

Title page, Albert A. Knopf edition

Book cover with spine, Albert A. Knopf edition

Book cover (front), Albert A. Knopf edition

Book jacket, Albert A. Knopf edition

Where The Action Is is an album by Scottish-Irish rock band The Waterboys, released in 2019 on Cooking Vinyl.

For the album art, designer Ian Ross used Timepiece (FontMesa, 2001). This font made by Michael Hagemann is based on the lettering for the poster for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, designed by Philip Castle in 1971. Timepiece comes in solid and shadow styles, which have been combined for chromatic effect on the album cover.

Timepiece is also used for the lyrics video for “Right Side of Heartbreak (Wrong Side of Love)”, the first UK single from the album.

[More info on Discogs]

Still from the lyrics video for “Right Side of Heartbreak (Wrong Side of Love)”.

Still from the lyrics video for “Right Side of Heartbreak (Wrong Side of Love)”.

Sticker with the band name as shown on the album cover.

Drumskin.

Source: www.abebooks.fr Librairie-Galerie Emmanuel Hutin (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style was first published in 1947. In 1963, Gallimard issued a deluxe hardcover edition. The 99 variations of the same story were typographically interpreted by Robert Massin (professionally known just as Massin), who had started working at Gallimard in 1958, serving as art director since 1960. Additionally included are 33 parallel exercises in style; drawn, painted, and carved by illustrator Jacques Carelman. This magnificient book deserves a post that also shows some of the interior pages and an analysis of the many typefaces in use. For the moment, a look at the cover and the title page will have to do.

The title is presented in four big lines, stacked and justified, with a different typeface for each line. “Exercices” is wrapped in two lines, in capitals from Comstock, a contoured grotesque first cast by the Inland Type Foundry in 1902 and also known under several other names including Astoria; and Didot. The specific version may be Initiales Firmin Didot, a caps-only cut offered by Deberny & Peignot in sizes up to 60pt. The dimensional seriffed letters depicted from an extreme perspective are probably from a 19th-century (wood?) typeface. All attention is ultimately directed to the word “style”. It’s presented in a range of bright colors in what otherwise is a monochrome cover. The bombastic letterforms are taken from a decorated capital alphabet originally shown in Jean Midolle’s lettering sampler Spécimen des écritures modernes (1834–1835) as Romaine (genre arabesque). Later on, after this book was designed, this face was adopted for dry-transfer lettering and inevitably made into a digital font, too.

These four lines are representative for Massin’s predilection for vintage and often expressive typefaces. The three small lines at the bottom are set in a more restrained and also much younger design: Folio was released by the Bauer foundry just a few years earlier, in 1957. The neo-grotesk was sold in France under the name Caravelle.

Source: www.abebooks.fr Librairie Le Feu Follet (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

The title page combines a multitude of typefaces, center-aligned, in a neo-Victorian fashion. The title is set in Didot caps, with a candlestick standing in for Y. The formal script appears to be Calligraphiques noires, issued by Deberny & Peignot in 1928. The shaded slab for “Carelman” is Initiales Compactes Éclairées, Deberny & Peignot’s name for a design that originated at the Bruce Type Foundry in 1865 and is better known as Gold Rush. The other typefaces are unidentified. If you have any insights, let us know in a comment.

In an article for Eye magazine no. 16 vol. 4 (1995), Richard Hollis regards the illustrated edition of Excercices de style as Massin’s “first important single piece of design at Gallimard”:

In attempting ‘a literal expression of the text (mainly limited to the titles),’ Massin displayed his skill with eccentric type forms, supplying each variation of the tale with a heading which suggests the narrative form that follows. Derived from the content, the type style becomes part of the expression of the text’s meaning. The letters are not decoration, but unified text and illustration. Massin’s Exercices de style was a further demonstration of Faucheux’s idea of ‘making connections between the text and its graphic expression.’ Since Faucheux had himself produced a book club version of Exercises de style in 1956, there was, for Massin, an element of rivalry as well as homage in the project.

On PaperPosts, Murray Grigo-McMahon shares several images of the interior pages, taken from a later edition issued by Gallimard in the late 1970s, with a different cover.

In 2007, Phaidon published a monograph of Massin’s work, edited by Laetitia Wolff. For more information about Massin and his œuvre, see also the features on Design Culture, Elisava, and Index Grafik as well as Jan Middendorp’s article for Eye about Massin and the Book.

Massin died February 8, 2020 at the age of 94.

Content Desert is a book that collects the 2-D graphic work of artist Mark Price.

The collection’s title presages an almost unfathomably absurd question to pose in 2017, “What would a moment without content look like?”

Content Desert is a post-internet object, a journey through graphic refuse amassed and extruded over several stylized chapters. The book brings together a multitude of hijacked glyphs, damaged vectors, stolen sentiments, and product mockups reimagined and recontextualized at the moment of content’s obsolescence. The resulting volume of deeply compromised images occupies a liminal space in the world of intelligibility.

Through the transformation of once-was content into high contrast and stylized detritus, Content Desert is an envoy from yesterday to tomorrow, delivering its anti-message through deconstructed forms, abandoned logos, and nonfunctional iconography, operating as though it were reliant on a befuddled and obtuse navigation application.

The 450-plus pages anachronously proceed from its obnoxious tag line of “1,000,0000 years of broken graphics … load more, know less”.

“Content Desert is a way to view the internet the way the bots might. A broken window into branded nightmares, a treasury of all the aesthetic pieces we are leaving behind without a second thought. This tightly constructed volume is the perfect physical distillation of a digital world. Chaotic, powerful, funny, at war with itself and you in the best way.”
— Maxwell Neely-Cohen, Author of Echo of the Boom

“Content Desert is an ominous graphic novel, that, at its heart, yearns for meaning. It skewers the consumer class hunger for more, especially when promulgated in the aesthetic of less. Yet, despite the assault of "anti-meaning," we ultimately want Price's labor—which feels arduous—to matter. It's in that desire that we experience the intimacy of Content Desert: in the dissolution of superlative individualism, what is value?”
— Jenna Crowder, Founding Editor of The Chart

“Content Desert is seemingly without precedent or clear genre. It's an artwork, graphic anti-novel, brand identity, art book and conceptual object. It's also a work of dadaist poetry. It cannot be scrolled easily though you should not give up trying.”
— Lee Tusman, artist and curator

More at twxx.us.

The title of Yonca Karaben Sözer’s novel Bir (Doğan Kitap) is Turkish for “one”. Geray Gençer designed a set of four cover variations, with different decorative 1s — customised, based on FF Scala Jewel Diamond, Moku 26 Birch, Bodoni Ornamental, and Ziggurat. Sabre is used for the text and also appears on the back cover.

Back cover

Detail of front cover type