The design of this book pays tribute to the unique world of Pierre Sala (1948–1989). The layout, inspired by his theatrical background, plays with words and spaces to evoke stage and movement. Two distinct typefaces, Janson Text and Hauser – one literary, the other more graphic – reflect the duality of his work between narrative and visual expressiveness. The color palette, inspired by the 1980s, with vivid and contrasting hues, captures the energy and originality of his creations, such as the Piranha chair and the Clairefontaine notebook desk.

The monograph was published by Éditions Hors Champ. See more images on the website of Mathilde Lambert who worked on the book’s design with and for Undo-Redo.

First edition cover. Limited edition of 300 copies signed by Bukowski, bound in publisher’s brown paper covered boards over blue-gray corduroy backstrip. The cover drawing is by the author.

What a joy and delight it is find fine books covers using Lydian. The first edition of Charles Bukowski’s Women uses Lydian for author and title on the cover (in all caps, naturally). And also, at least judging by photos found on Abebooks, Lydian is used for the interior title page, with the title in red, repeated several times above in gold.

There is no doubt that choosing Lydian for a book cover in the 1970s was unusual. Matthijs notes a gap after the 1960s and this 1978 cover may be an exception that proves the rule, or merely soften the exact boundaries of Matthijs’s void.

I haven’t read the book, but Wikipedia attests that “One of the first women featured in the book [...] is a character named Lydia”, so this may qualify as an LTypI.

Title page. Secondary typefaces are Century Expanded (left) and Trump-Mediäval (publisher credit).

A straight look on the title page, from a paperback edition

The colophon is set in Janson Text.

Signed limited deluxe edition

Cover of the second edition (1979)

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.

30,000 on the Hoof is a Western novel by Zane Grey (1872–1939), published posthumously in 1940. Shown here is the first-edition cover by Grosset & Dunlap.

The title typeface, an all-caps roman with flare serifs and inline effect, is Atrax. “Thirty thousand” is written as a number. This way, we get to see Atrax’ numerals, which exhibit diagonal contrast – unlike the letters, which are drawn around a vertical contrast axis. With all weight apportioned to the bottom left, the zero almost looks like a dimensional ball.

If you try to learn about the origins of Atrax from a font marketplace like Monotype’s MyFonts, you’ll find that it was designed by “URW Design Staff” and that the design is owned by URW Type Foundry (a publisher acquired by Monotype in 2020). The tags hint at a date in the 1990s. That’s misleading at best, and only relates to one of the digitizations.

In fact, Atrax is a design by Heinrich Jost (1889–1948), a student of Paul Renner and Emil Preetorius. From 1923 until his premature death, Jost served as the art director for Bauer, during the type foundry’s most successful years, overlooking the release of his former teacher’s Futura. Issued in 1926, Atrax was Jost’s first published type design of his own. It was followed by Beton and Bauer Bodoni, among others.

The name of the author is added in all-caps Futura fett.

On the title page, the book’s title is set in Goudy Open. The designer apparently didn’t like this typeface’s zero, which is a monolinear circle, and used the lowercase letter o instead (in his own book, Goudy agreed).

Most of the smaller text is set in Janson, apparently using the version by Mergenthaler Linotype. Judging from the narrower Z in “ZANE”, the heading at the top of the left page is set in Monotype Janson, though. The publisher’s name at the bottom right looks like it’s Mergenthaler Linotype’s Garamond (No. 1), a design based on Stempel Garamond.

The Accenta is an alarm system first developed by Honeywell in the early 2000s. The Accenta+ ADE model shown here uses ITC Avant Garde Gothic for the buttons and Frutiger for the labels. “ADE” is based on Stop, while the Accenta+ logo appears to be Janson Text Bold Italic, stretched and further slanted.

In 2011, Wout de Vringer designed Nomad, a book by photographer Jeroen Toirkens that documents nomadic lifestyle around the Northern hemisphere. The typography pairs Janson Text and BVH Baldinger, mainly used in its Thin weight.

From De Vringer’s portfolio website:

Since the beginning of time, nomadic people have roamed the earth, looking for food, feeding their cattle. Looking for an existence, freedom. Living in the wild, mountains, deserts, on tundra and ice. With only a thin layer of tent between them and nature. Earth in the 21st century is a crowded place, roads and cities are everywhere. Yet somehow, these people hold on to traditions that go back to the very beginning of human civilization. This strikingly beautiful and unusual photobook takes us on a multi-continent search for the last living nomadic peoples in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s a remarkable journey, showing facets of modern-day nomadic cultures that are not quite what one would expect to find.

Window for an accompanying exhibition at the Vrije Academie / Gemak (now The Grey Space In The Middle) in The Hague.

Hommegirls is a biannual publication for women who champion androgynous fashion.

For the fourth volume, “Volume Up” – Hommegirls Fall 2020, the three covers feature a spot-foiled and fluorescent pink Pantone exclamation point as a marker to celebrate the various voices inciting change within their respective fields within the issue. This is contrasted against black and white imagery and a grainy matte paper. Druk was used to signify the volume’s name, adapted for the cover stars names within the exclamation point, and further used in the heavy weight of Druk Wide for headlines throughout the publication. Janson Text in Roman and Italic variations was used for team credits, fashion credits, and copy, with a cameo for ITC American Typewriter Italic for the “The HG 20” piece.

Design by Roslyn Fok, a graphic designer based in New York who has worked for clients such as Nike, Converse, Chanel, and Proenza Schouler.

The three covers feature Paloma Elsesser photographed by Cass Bird; Sasha Lane photographed by Chiara Gabellini; and King Princess photographed by Katsu Naito. Creative direction by Brill Brill Studio and Thakoon Panichgul.

In Skarstedt Gallery’s latest exhibition catalogue for KAWS: Blackout, I made dynamic use of the raw modernism of Maison, juxtaposed with Janson Text. Blackout presents the artist’s new work at their London gallery space. Designed at Punkt, the publication is case bound with a black edged book block, gloss foiled typography on Silktouch Nuba, printed in eight colours. For more images, see the posts on Instagram (@punktdotcom).

The printing was done in the UK by Generation Press. Using 8 colours, blending custom mixed fluorescents into the litho process because the artist’s colours are so vivid that they are technically out of gamut range of a traditional litho press, the results are as close to seeing the works with the naked eye as you can get.

The typography is restrained and plays a supporting role to KAWS’ artwork but is highly considered nonetheless.

ITC Caslon No. 223 in early use for an ad for Ballantine’s scotch whisky in Playboy magazine, April 1970. The quotes and the advertising slogan are in roman and italic styles of a version of Janson Text.

Fronesis (Swedish for "phronesis" - Greek for a type of wisdom relevant to practical action) is one of Sweden's leading voices in critical theory. Based in Malmö and founded in 1998, they publish a quarterly magazine with texts from philosophers, activists and alike. Every issue follows a specific theme, such as “Crisis”, “Ideology” or “Movement”.

The printed magazine uses a simple and direct layout that has stayed the same for all its now 55 issues. Covers feature the nameplate and theme in Eurostile, with a complementary image (sometimes humorous in nature). The interior text is split into two columns and set in Janson Text, giving it a feeling that is more straight faced-book than radical lefty-mag. Very much a case of "perfect self-aware dullness".

In 2003, London studio Graphic Thought Facility’s identity for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre made use of striking photography (by Nigel Shafran) of actors in full Elizabethan garb caught seemingly unguarded in the theatre’s backstage facilities (dressing room, restroom, lift, etc.). The whole creative approach was obliquely referring to that year’s theme, “The Season of Regime Change”, and was used for all promotional material, from posters to leaflets and programs. The main typeface used is Janson Text, Linotype’s revival of Miklós Tótfalusi Kis’ 17th-century classic, juxtaposed with Univers for the additional information. The following year, this scheme was carried on for “The Season of Star-Crossed Lovers”.

Continuing along the lines set by the wine label on the bottle of its predecessor, Llavors Negre, containing fragments of press articles, every year, Llavors Blanc illustrates its label inspired by a literary tale that conceals a peculiar aspect: the word “llavors” is hidden among its lines, a play on words in Catalan with the two meanings of the term: “then” and “seeds”. For the first vintage, the chosen text is a page from the book Rere els Murs, set during the construction of the Monastery of Sant Pere de Rodes, a key factor in the winemaking history of the Empordà region.

Dr. Scholl’s launched the Original Exercise Sandal in 1965. Sold in drugstores as a way to tone legs, the sandal became an iconic 60s fashion accessory when worn by Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy.

To mark the sandal's 50th anniversary, the collection was renamed the “The Original’s Sandal’s” and a new identity, using Venus Extended and Janson, was created. A booklet that tells the sandal’s story and an invitation to the collection preview uses Janson for text and Granby for punctuation.

There isn’t any type on the front and spine of the jacket for John Steinbeck’s novella, and yet it qualifies for the inclusion on Fonts In Use: the freely-drawn caps are clearly based on Cartoon. This caps-only typeface, a design by Howard Trafton, was first cast by Bauer in 1936 – just one year before the book was released. Apart from the fact that repeating letters are not identical, the only real departure from the model is the M and how the center strokes meet – it’s almost like an upside-down W, but not quite.

For the text on the back and the inner flaps, Memphis was paired with the bold display face known as Titanic or Hercules. Its jolly A and M make me think of Robert Crumb’s Keep on Truckin’ cartoon.

Printed in the United States of America by J.J. Little and Ives Company, New York. Robert Josephy is credited as the designer. It is unclear whether he is responsible for the interior only, or also for the jacket.

Facsimile dust jacket

Glyph set of Cartoon Bold

Another book jacket by Peter Mendelsund, similar to my earlier post, also using an in-and-out relationship between type and design elements. The vertical bars are done in bronze foil. (The “dead house” was a prison.) The five main lines of type are in something stronger than white burnout — a matte foil, probably, or maybe even screenprint?

The book was designed by Soonyoung Kwon and set in Janson Text.

Jacket by Archie Ferguson. Interior by Virginia Tan, who said this about the design in AIGA’s 50 Books/50 Covers of 1996:

“Given the vivid and rough content of the book and the stark and stylish jacket design, I wanted the design of the interior to be strong and unadorned. The trim size seemed small for such a strong topic. I chose an extra bold sans serif face, ‘pushed’ the letters together, and made the title as large as I could, bleeding off all sides. The ‘H’ on the right side of the title spread suggested a confined, limited space, which I used as the type area for the title page. The part titles followed in the same position as the running heads and folios did. The text is plain and the book within the book at the end is designed to look like the typewriter-produced document it was supposed to be. The black-on-black binding design echoes the glossy/matte design of the jacket and the plainness of the interior, with the title on the front again in the same off-center position as the inside titles. I enjoy working with type as a medium and like the way this title created a design format in itself.”

Jacket design by S. Neil Fujita.

A facsimile of the jacket is available from Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC.

Both the cover and the interior were designed by John D. Berry. The ampersand is included in Big Caslon as an alternate.

This book won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1996. Hayden Carruth (1921–2008) lived and worked in New England.

Artbook:

This affordable and accessible series from the renowned German art book publisher and bookseller Walther König collects conversations between curator and culture activator Hans Ulrich Obrist and other seminal and emerging figures in the worlds of art, architecture and ideas.