Promotional poster for Mes Pants de Queer, a thrift and self-publishing bookstore by, for and about LGBTQ2SAI+ communities in Montréal.

I've just found this magazine from Peru in Budapest, only God knows why.

Textual is the journal of the Peruvian National Institute of Culture. Concerned with literature, humanities, and arts, it was published between 1971 and 1975. CEDOC (Centro de Documentación de la Biblioteca Central UNMSM) has digitizations of all ten issues. The logo is based on Amelia, in lowercase letters and with filled-in counters.

Number 9 is dedicated to philosopher, educator and journalist Augusto Salazar Bondy (1925–1974). Display typefaces used in this issue include Michel, Thalia, and Ludlow Garamond. Body text is set in Helvetica and Permanent, with drop caps from Neo Script.

Thalia with enlarged and descending caps

Colophon (left) and a black-and-white version of Salazar Bondy’s portrait as seen on the cover (right)

All-caps Michel and Thalia in mixed case

More Michel caps combined with pre-Columbian symbols

Text in Helvetica is printed on top of the title in reversed caps from Michel

A mix of caps and lowercase letters from Thalia for “Educación”

This creature apparently is a raptorial bird as depicted by members of the Chavín culture

Spread with drop caps from Neo Script

Detail from the colophon, with text set in two weights of Permanent

Rotated Ludlow Garamond for “Bibliografía”

This Perfect Day is the third novel by Ira Levin (1929–2007), following the Edgar Award winning A Kiss Before Dying (1953), the international bestseller Rosemary’s Baby (1967), and – as mentioned on the cover – the thriller novel The Boys from Brazil (1976). First published by Random House in 1970 with a jacket design by Paul Bacon, this is Dell’s 1979 paperback edition of this classic science fiction novel about a technocratic dystopia. Cover artist unknown.

Author’s name and title are in Amelia, the latter with an extra serif added to the left of the T as well as a descending f. The futuristic display face by Stan Davis was previously used for Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock – which gets name-checked in the blurb. Smaller text appears to be set in Helvetica Rounded which was released the year before, in 1978.

[More info on ISFDB]

Afro-Harping is a 1968 album by harpist Dorothy Ashby, released on Cadet Records. The album blends soul jazz, funk, and orchestral elements, with arrangements by Richard Evans. It features standout tracks like Soul Vibrations and title track, Afro-Harping.

The cover was designed by Jerry Griffith, with the album title set in Amelia.

[More info on Discogs]

Before Nokia made itself a name as a telecommunications and mobile telephony brand, the Finnish company was active in different industries. Originally established as a pulp mill in 1865, it had long been associated with rubber and cables. Since 1967, they’ve been manufacturing rubber boots. In 1990, this branch split into a separate company, Nokian Jalkineet (“Nokian Footwear”). The ad shown here is from 1972, five years after Finnish Rubber Works merged with the Finnish Cable Company and Nokia Company, forming the Nokia Corporation.

“Go-happy fashion” is shown in Amelia with alternating glyph colors. The mid-1960s typeface by Stan Davis is also used for the product names, “go-joy” and “go-gay”. The slogan, “Saapastelkaa uuteen villiin tahtiin!” (“Step into a new wild rhythm!”), is set in Futura Extra Bold Condensed, the small copy is in Helvetica.

Adze of Penguin is the fourth full-length album by the band apart. The cover design, credited to the band members themselves, is dominated by bold, rough brush strokes, with the title and artist name set in Amelia in the bottom right corner.

[More info on Discogs]

Almost an entire font catalog on an album cover! This 1973 record compilation of UK television show theme music features at least 14 unique typefaces, each a logotype of a different TV program.

I see Bookman Swash, Stop, Amelia… and a bunch more that I look forward to learning about. The title in particular is one I don’t think I’ve seen before.

[More info on Discogs]

Source: archive.org Bitsavers. License: All Rights Reserved.

April 1970 issue ft. Amelia

Modern Data was a professional trade journal “for corporate and technical management, systems analysis, EDP managers, software specialists, and computer systems and operations managers.” It was published by Delta Publications, Inc., Framingham, Massachusetts, from around 1968 to 1976, initially with the subtitle “Products, Systems, Services”.

For the first volumes and at least until 1974, Optima was used for the logo, in tightly spaced caps. No art director is credited, but the cover art for most issues from this period is by William Kwiatkowski.

By January 1976, John W. Kelley, Jr. had assumed the role of art director and introduced a new logo based on Blippo Black (not shown here).

Source: archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

January 1970 issue with “Modern Data” in two lines and the subtitle “Products, Systems, Services”. “The Videofile System” is in Optima, too.

Source: archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

June 1970 issue ft. Helvetica

Source: archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

July 1970 issue ft. Folio

Source: archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

November 1970 issue, again ft. Amelia

Source: archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

December 1970 issue ft. Akzidenz-Grotesk extra and Helvetica

Georg Salden’s York and Stan Davis’ Amelia, two of fifteen typefaces that were selected in a competition sponsored by Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC) in 1966, used together for the title of Passport to the Supernatural from 1972. This occult compendium was authored by Bernhardt J. Hurwood (1926–1987) who wrote on a variety of subjects.

This movie tie-in edition of Brave New World was released in 1978, announcing a “television mini-series from NBC” (the 1980 movie?) on the cover.

Cover art by Drew Struzan. Amelia is used for the title (with long SW shade) and the numerals. The author’s name is in Moore Computer.

[More info on ISFDB]

“The artwork was designed for the book cover (front & back) and was also used to advertise the made for TV movie.” – Drew Struzan

Pascal User Manual and Report, second edition.

Following Sander de Jong’s post on Niklaus Wirth I came across these covers for the Pascal User Manual and Report. Of the many programming languages that Niklaus Wirth designed and contributed to, Pascal is perhaps the best known, particularly among undergraduate programming courses of the 1970s and 1980s. This showing of the second edition has a cartouche proclaiming “Special Printing for Apple Computer, Inc.”, which hints at the fact that Pascal was the preferred systems programming language for Mac apps prior to Mac OS X (the period that Wikipedia calls the “Macintosh Era”).

I didn’t realise at the time, but the silver cover is a common design element for Springer–Verlag’s computer science series (see my earlier post on Programming in Prolog). Here, the silver is paired with red for the large keyword “pascal” in Amelia for the second and third edition, and Stop for the fourth edition. Both of which happen to be favourites of mine. The first edition is part of Springer–Verlag’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series and has a much plainer covers, and no good scans available online.

I’m not sure what the solid red stripes above the “pascal” in the second edition are trying to do. The top right has a clipped corner, probably a reference to the clipped corner of an IBM 80-column punched card that dominated the industry at the time Pascal was introduced.

Remaining text is in Helvetica.

Niklaus Wirth died this year, 2024, on January 1.

Third edition. Compared to the second edition, the shape above the word “pascal” has been reduced to an outline that still follows the contours of the letters.

Fourth edition. Amelia has been replaced by Stop.

Front cover

Mama’s Gun is the second album by Erykah Badu, released on November 21, 2000 by Motown Records. The neo soul album incorporates elements of funk, soul and jazz. It deals with insecurity, personal relationships and social problems.

The album features Badu's top 10 Billboard hit single “Bag Lady”, which was nominated for a Grammy Award, and guest appearances by Betty Wright and trumpeter Roy Hargrove.

The cover takes on the colors of the reggae movement. The photo of the artist was taken by Robert Maxwell. It’s framed by red and yellow lines. The title is set in Amelia, in yellow with a red flat shade. On each line, we can read “eryKahBadu Mama’s Gun”. The artist’s name is spelled with a lowercase e, an uppercase K, and no wordspaces. The color of the frame and the typeface blend with the treatment of the photo echoing the colors and the shades.

The tracklist and credits on the back are set in an unidentified bitmap font. Basis and Preset-F are similar, but not a match.

The design is credited to Simone/Whitfield, with art direction by Mickey Whitfield together with Badu. Additional photography by Don Thompson.

[More info on Discogs]

Back cover

Vinyl record

De Primera is the debut solo album by pop artist Marina Sena. As the title predicted, the album from the young Brazilian singer was well-received by public and critics. Creative direction by Marcelo Jarosz, photography by Fernando Tomaz, and design by Giovanna Cianelli.

The main typefaces in use are Druk Wide and Neue Haas Grotesk, paired with bits of ITC Machine and lettering.

The provocative and controversial science fiction novel.

Ballantine’s 1972 paperback edition of The Lovers, an early novella by Philip José Farmer that was first published by Samuel Mines in Startling Stories, August 1952. It earned him the Hugo Award for Best New SF Author or Artist in 1953 – the first of three Hugos awards he won in his career – and is “critically recognized as the story that broke the taboo on sex in science fiction.” [Wikipedia] Farmer worked it into a full-length novel in 1961.

The cover art is a (weak) reproduction of Astral Body Awake (1969) by Mati Klarwein. It’s combined with Amelia, a typeface that was popular at the time, and also appeared for other science fiction paperbacks, see e.g. Penguin’s SF series.

[More info on ISFDB]

Back cover: “Twentieth Anniversary Classic Science Fiction Celebration”

Outface is an EP with two tracks of techno music by Komakino. First released in 1993 under the name Energy Trance, this is the cover of the 1995 re-release on the German Maddog label.

The title is repeated three times in all-lowercase Amelia, shown in blue with a double contour: first a light orange fade, then a hard black outline. We can see a thick blue bar that underlines the title. The same blue fade outline is applied to the butterfly, too.

Cover design by Zentrale/Fink.

[More info on Discogs]

The 1973 reissue of “Space Oddity” (with B-side “The Man Who Sold The World”) became David Bowie’s first hit in the USA. It uses the same photo (by Mick Rock) as the album cover, just printed in black and white. The type is somewhat similar, too: instead of Magnetic Ink, it here is Amelia, another futuristic face from the second half of the 1960s.

[More info on Discogs]

In this highly referential poster, Akiko Stehrenberger plays off the psychedelic 1960s artwork of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine to create a poster featuring, well… a yellow Philly Cheesesteak and the cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

In sticking with the Yellow Submarine formula, Stehrenberger uses the font Amelia, cut out from a blue sky.

The result is as zany and fun as both Always Sunny and Yellow Submarine.

The poster as reporoduced in Akikomatic: The Work of Akiko Stehrenberger, Hat & Beard Press, 2019

Fonts from the Flea Market #818

Gemma (Mecanorma, ca. 1973) and Amelia (VGC, ca. 1966; copied by Mecanorma as Orea) for the German sleeve of “Bad Blood”. Written by Neil Sedaka with Phil Cody, the song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1975, and became Sedaka’s most successful individual commercial release.

[More info on Discogs]

Big bichromatic Bullion Shadow for a single by Fresh Cream, with the project’s name set in caps from Amelia. While the former originated at Face Photosetting and was available for dry transfer lettering from Letraset, the latter is a VGC original that got copied by Letraset’s French competitor Mecanorma under the name Orea.

Early electronics by French vibraphonist and band leader Guy Boyer. 1972 French pressing on Mercury label.

[More info on Discogs]

Shame! and Masculinity, Ernst van Alphen (ed.), 2020

Published by Valiz in Amsterdam,

The Valiz PLURAL series focuses on how the intersections between identity, power, representation and emancipation play out in the arts and in cultural practices.

The volumes in this series aim to do justice to the plurality of voices, experiences and perspectives in society and in arts and design. The volumes address historical, present and future meanings of these positions and their interrelations, layering and diversity. PLURAL brings together new and critical insights from cultural and social researchers, theorists, artists, arts professionals and activists.

Designed by Lotte Lara Schröder, illustrations that play with irregular shapes and cropped photography are paired with convention-breaking typefaces: Zipper, Amelia, and CoFo Chimera which is paired with another Maria Doreuli typeface, CoFo Sans, for the author names and interior captions and other secondary text.

The series was selected by the Student Jury (not yet published online) as one of the Best Dutch Book Designs 2020.

Feminist Art Activisms and Artivisms, Katy Deepwell (ed.), 2020

Design Struggles: Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives, Claudia Mareis, Nina Paim (eds.), 2021