“Tomorrow’s Dream” b/w “Laguna Sunrise” is a single from Vol 4, the fourth studio album by Black Sabbath, released in September 1972. The Italian sleeve depicts a necklace with a cross pendant, with the heads of the band members shown between the four beams. The typeface is Tony Wenman’s Bottleneck, issued by Letraset in 1972.

[More info on Discogs]

From Wikipedia:

“Halo of Flies” is a 1973 single by rock band Alice Cooper taken from their 1971 album Killer. The single was only released in the Netherlands, two years after the song appeared on the album. […] Upon its 1973 single release, the song became a top 10 hit in the Netherlands and also charted in neighboring Belgium because of imports. The single release featured the B-side “Under My Wheels”, also a song of the Killer album, which had already been released as a single two years prior.

The song titles are shown in Bottleneck, in all caps and all lowercase letters, respectively. “Alice Cooper”, “special release for holland”, and the photo credit for Ashley Pandel use Cooper Black. The narrow sans is Monotype Grotesque Extra Condensed. It’s paired with Britannic for the “DJ’s choice” seal.

[More info on Discogs]

Bottleneck in early use for the German release of “We’re Free”, the controversial free love anthem by American singer and actress Beverly Bremers (b. 1950). Wikipedia has her comments on the surprise success of the song:

“We’re Free” was banned on a lot of stations, which sounds hilarious now. Back then a lot of people didn’t like the (idea) of living together without being married. That was the theme of the song and ironically it was a huge country hit. The Bible Belt didn’t care. It never got airplay on the coasts, but it was huge in Canada and in the South and the mid-West. It made the Country charts.

Tony Wenman’s bottom-heavy face can be seen with customized swash initials for the singer’s name – and an enlarged terminal s.

[More info on Discogs]

1973 reissue of demo sessions recorded by Soft Machine in London, April 1967, and originally released under the title Faces and Places Vol. 7 in 1972.

The uncredited designer used Bottleneck (Letraset, 1972) and spaced the bottom-heavy letters so tightly that several of them join up.

The editors of Discogs point out that the colored portraits of Elton Dean, Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper, and Robert Wyatt show the wrong line-up: Dean and Hopper are not present on these recordings.

[More info on Discogs]

Front cover of the soundtrack album

Alexander of the Herb Lubalin Study Center showed a mostly typographic and entirely black-and-white “Style B” poster made for The Harder They Come. He points out that other promotional posters for the film were done in the blaxploitation style. This post is about the most striking design among those.

The soundtrack album to the Jamaican cult film was released in the United Kingdom in July 1972 by Island Records. A North American release followed in February 1973 on Mango Records. The sleeve design is credited to London-based CCS Associates, with cover art by John Bryant.

The title is rendered in Bottleneck. Tony Wenman’s design for Letraset was brand new at the time: it was issued earlier in 1972, likely inspired by the success of Seymour Chwast’s Art Tone, and most closely following its Boot Black style. The bottom-heavy letterforms were drawn by hand, arranged on an arch, contoured, extruded, and filled with color gradients. Jimmy Cliff’s name got a similarly colorful treatment, with shaded letterforms loosely based on Cooper Black Italic: the initial J obtained a large descending hook, C was streamlined, and the f’s elongated.

This artwork was also used for a poster issued by Island Records to promote the album, and later got adopted for posters made for various re-releases of the film.

[More info on Discogs]

Promotional poster for the soundtrack by Island Records, UK, 1973. The elements of Bryant’s artwork were rearranged for the taller format.

British Quad (30″×40″) poster for a 1977 re-release of the “original uncut version” by Lagoon Associates. Again, the elements of Bryant’s artwork were rearranged, now optimized for the landscape format. Additional text is set in all-caps Franklin Gothic.

German poster (24.25″×16.5″) for a 1980 re-release by Melody & Art Films, featuring a coarser copy of the original art, with a simpler color scheme – which extends to the lettering. The text added at the bottom uses the upright style of Cooper Black, apparently applied as rub-down type.

Back cover of the soundtrack album (Mango Records, 1973). Most text is produced on a typewriter, making use of double spacing and several ellipses to justify the last paragraph. “Original Soundtrack Recording” is in unmodified Bottleneck. Credits are set in Univers Condensed and Helvetica.

Front and back cover of the gatefold

Inner gatefold with a collage of photos and lyrics.

This compilation album with “20 original hits” by Harry Belafonte was released by budget label K-Tel Records in Australia and New Zealand. There is no date on the album, but Searching for a Gem dates it to 1980. The singer’s name is in all-caps Bottleneck (Letraset, 1972).

[More info on Discogs]

The track names on the back are shown in a phototype version of Franklin Gothic distinguished by what looks like a non-standard R.

Open Glowworm (Mecanorma, 1975) and blood-dripping Bottleneck (Letraset, 1972), used together on the picture sleeve for Amanda Lear’s disco hit “Blood & Honey”. The single was released in late 1976 with “She's Got the Devil in Her Eyes” as the B-side. The design sadly isn’t credited.

Bogdan Żochowski’s Glowworm is easily distinguished from similar faces like Frankfurter Highlight (Letraset, 1978) or Pluto (Face, 1969/1970) by its asymmetrical M.

[More info on Discogs]

Artwork for a cover version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Every Day a Little Death”, performed by Nedelle Torrisi and Nicholas Krgovich.

The artist names are set in Bottleneck and the song name uses Maxed Out NF, a digitization of Riverside Drive. Everything else uses Avenir Next.

I don't know much about this use, other that it uses both Bottleneck and Stripes by Tony Wenman. The names of the songs “Dobra Ti Večer, Mati Moja” and “Dite Moje” – which translate to something like “Good Evening, My Mother” and “My Child” are set in Futura Extra Bold Condensed in all lowercase. The name of the artist Mišo is in all caps from the aforementioned typeface, with a custom caron accent for the character Č.

For “SPLIT”, the 8-line typeface has been partly filled. It seems to be a logotype for a music contest for 1980, and was used for a whole series of records. Mišo Kovač (b. 1941) is the best selling artist from Croatia.

[More info on Discogs]

“Colorful trains, flowery vacation”: A nice hand-rendered Bottleneck (Tony Wenman, 1972) in quite a gaily 1979 advertisement for the National Railway Company of Belgium (NMBS).

The ‘flower-powered’ ad was designed by Paul Funken (1932–), who was responsible for many of the progressive Swiss-style NMBS advertisements and posters in the 1960s. Arjan den Boer posted a tweet about this poster (translated from Dutch):

The Belgian railways were progressive in poster design in the 1960s. This is mainly thanks to the designers Paul Funken and André Pasture. They developed a Belgian variant of the Swiss Style with sleek typography, lots of white space, and abstracted or geometric representations.

Part of the Belgian train museum Train World.

Bottleneck (Letraset, 1972) together with Pinto (Rapitype/Mecanorma, ca. 1969) in use for the book jacket of A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, edited by Denis Gifford and published by Hamlyn, London, in 1973. The art is by Tom Chantrell.

Read all about it – cats, bats, phantoms, apemen and green rubber monsters, all from the lost world and dark houses of the Golden Age of Horrorwood! Watch the Mummy rise bandaged from its tomb, see Frankenstein’s creation reach out to grasp the sun, listen to the howl of the werewolves when the iron tongue of midnight has struck twelve!
From Mélies’ magic to the hauntings of Hammer, Denis Gifford will take you, ‘Raven’-loving reader, racing along in his ghost-ridden rattle-trap, a hair-raising journey down the highway of horror. No stones are left unturned and the long lost rise up to snarl and smirk beneath the dusty beam of the projector. The cinema’s sorcerers stand before you, splendidly summoned by anartful pen: Lugosi, curiously cadenced, blood on his lips; Max Shreck, shadowy, dissolving at dawn; the silken-voiced and unseen Rains; Veidt, lady-snatching on the roof-tops; Price, waxing strong in his museum; Laughton, bowed beneath his hump; beasts, brutes and mutants; zombies, devil bats and masked beings; claymen and vampires; dinosaurs from a distant era, things from outer space and horrors from the deep – all clamour for attention. Jekyll becomes Hyde, Kong becomes King, Lon Chaney becomes everybody and Karloff remains stupendously himself, bestriding the age in his eighteen-pound boots.
It is a book to be read, studied, treasured, looked at and, above all, enjoyed, and if you have to put it down, be careful not to step on it – it may be Lon Chaney!

African Woman by King Bucknor Jr. is an afrobeat album from 1979. The title is set in all-caps Cut-In Bold with an alternate C and a modified A. The artist’s name uses Bottleneck in all-lowercase letters. King Bucknor Jr.’s alias, “The Black Isaiah of Africa”, is shown in Stripes. Both Bottleneck and Stripes were designed by Tony Wenman. Finally, the name of his band Afrodisk beat is set in Venus Extrabold Extended, with an ampersand taken from Futura Display.

From Forced Exposure:

Forthcoming on Hot Casa: “A fantastic afro-beat album from a Fela Anikulapo Kuti disciple and Kalakuta Republic member. A sublime spiritual and political session recorded in 1979 at the Emi studio in Lagos (Nigeria). Arranged and self produced, this second Kingsley Buckor’s album, hopelessly obscure and impossible to find ranks alongside the best afro-beat album in history!”

From Discogs:

At the age of 19, King Bucknor Jr., also known as the Black Isaiah of Africa, released his second album backed by a 16 band members called “The Afrodisk” and 10 background singers. Two long and hypnotic grooves with all the afro-beat ingredients, fluid and complex drums patterns, strong horns, female voices on chorus, strong lyrics, beautiful keys and horns solos

The lyrics and credits on the back cover appear to be set in Times New Roman and Univers.

The album was re-issued in 2017 by Hot Casa Records in France, with an interview on the back cover.

The title of this Danish comedy record is set in Bottleneck by Tony Wenman, it is set on a curve to emulate the spheric geometry of the bomb, which is exploding on the back cover.

The name of the comedians appears to be calligraphic.

[More info on Discogs]

Nice blend of Victorian (and Victorian-inspired) typefaces on this album cover designed by Everton Mead in 1976, in Kingston, Jamaica.

The cover blends Bottleneck (inspired by Seymour Chwast’s Art Tone), Compacta, Davida, and Ribbonette, all of which were most likely photographically set.

King Tubby was a legendary pioneer of the Dub genre of music, a precursor to a lot of later electronic music production.

[More info on Discogs]

The typography on the back cover is in Times New Roman, with roman caps for the track list and italics for the credits.

Spanish release, probably with the most elaborate type treatment: Georg Trump’s Time Script was slanted, set on a dramatic angle with tight letterspacing, and further enhanced with a gradient fill, gloomy shadows, and blood dripping from the double o. The script is contrasted with all-caps Washington Bold. The same sleeve design was also used in Germany and Austria. [More info on Discogs]

Five very different sleeve designs from various European countries for “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”, the opening title track and first single release from Black Sabbath’s album of the same name, released in late 1973 with “Changes” as B-side.

The covers provide a cross section of what was popular in display type at the time, although it’s difficult to make out one common trend. There’s the multiline/Op art theme (Black Line), the unearthed turn-of-the-century oddities (Tintoretto, Frankonia) including the hippie revival of Jugendstil/Secession forms (Dreamline), and the amorphous, bottom-heavy styles (Bottleneck, Putty Bold) that had come in fashion shortly before. At the same time, we see various sans serifs, ranging from classics to contemporary heavyweights (Antique Olive Compact, Neil Bold) and new interpretations of Art Deco themes (Washington, Premier Shaded), to futuristic ones (Handel Gothic). Eight out of 14 typeface designs originated in phototype and dry transfer, four were created in the previous three years. Now one could ask the chicken-and-egg question: Were those typefaces trending that were offered by the type providers? Or did the font makers respond to the current trends?

What I find more interesting is the fact that there were hardly any genre-specific typeface preferences yet. None of the featured typefaces is inherently “metal” or “hard rock”. This is different for the album: With the stylized blackletter on the cover, it’s instantly clear what kind of music it contains. Mean letterforms for mean music. On the international single sleeves, though, the styles are all over the place. Those were often made by local divisions of record labels and distributors. In most cases, the bands had no word in the design decisions. There was no well-defined genre typography yet, it was all still “pop type”. Just compare this set of covers to another one by ABBA from around the same time. The music and fanbase is very different. The type styles are fairly similar, though, and some fonts are even the same.

The French version by Série Parade/Vertigo likewise does without a photograph. It features bichromatic Tintoretto caps paired with lowercase Frankonia for the titles. Note the mirrored quote marks. [More info on Discogs]

Scandinavian version by Vertigo, ft. Antique Olive Compact. [More info on Discogs]

Italian pressing on WWA Records ft. Bottleneck and Gill Sans. [More info on Discogs] Why’s the final letter in the band name from the lowercase? As there’s nothing too fancy about Bottleneck’s H, I have to assume that the designer ran out of dry-transfer letters. The third B looks fishy, too – it may have been made by repurposing parts of other characters.

The Portuguese release wins the prize for most typefaces, randomly picked. The front cover has bichromatic Premier Shaded with filled-in counters and both forms of A, arranged on a bouncing baseline and paired with all-caps Neil Bold and Putty Bold …

… while the back cover surprises with a completely different, equally variegated mix of fonts. ft. Black Line, Handel Gothic, Dreamline, and Univers Condensed Italic. [More info on Discogs]

“Right On” in Stripes, with alternates used to make ligatures. Some of its eight lines were filled in as it was suggested by Letraset.

From the Peculiar Manicule’s superb collection of mod miscellania: A sheet of six colorful stickers with popular 1960s/70s sayings like “Right on” and “Keep on truckin’”. The sheet is undated, but the inclusion of Stripes reveals it can’t be printed any earlier than 1973, when this typeface was first issued by Letraset.

“Pow” is derived from Optex (Letraset, 1970). P and W are customized.

Bottleneck (Letraset, 1972) for “Stay loose”. The bottom-heavy face was designed by Tony Wenman who also created Stripes.

Futura Black for “Keep on truckin’’”. Originally issued by the Bauer foundry in 1929, the modernist stencil face was adopted by Letraset, too.

Full sheet. “Love” appears to be lettering modeled after an extrabold sans. “Wow” is based on Optex.

The village hall in Elgol on the Isle of Skye, Scotland was completed in 1997. It also houses a shop, the post office, and a cafe. The wooden sign features raised letters from Bottleneck, a bottom-heavy display face designed by Tony Wenman for Letraset in 1972 (leaning heavily on Seymour Chwast’s Art Tone). I dig it when such fad faces pop up several decades after their best-before date. And on top of that in such an unexpected function, size, and medium!

From Wikipedia:

Made in England is the fourth album by British rock band Atomic Rooster. Although previously known for generally having a progressive rock style, this album saw the band moving in more of a funk/soul direction, largely influenced by new singer Chris Farlowe. Apart from founder member Vincent Crane, the album was recorded by an entirely different lineup to that of the band's prior effort, In Hearing of Atomic Rooster. Previous members John Du Cann and Paul Hammond had departed in protest at Crane's intended new musical direction.

In the UK and Germany, original copies of the LP came wrapped in an actual denim sleeve. Later pressings came in a standard art sleeve.

The denim cover came in a number of color varieties — and with different sticker labels. The original cover (see comments) uses a small sticker with red all caps type, with the band name in Koloss, followed by the album title in what looks like Helvetica.

The other label is does not hide, nor overrule the denim sleeve. The band name and album title use bottom-heavy Bottleneck – all lowercase for the band name, sentence case for the album title.

[More info on Discogs]

Cover design by Barney Bubbles, with photography by Brian Griffin. The band name is in Lazybones, with the alternate (non-descending) t and a modified i. “Free EP” on the sticker shows another Letraset face from 1972: Bottleneck.