It’s Not Up to Us is the debut album by Pennsylvanian saxophonist/flautist Byard Lancaster (1942–2012). Recorded in 1966, it came out in 1968 as one of the first releases by Vortex, a sublabel of Atlantic Records dedicated to jazz.

Artwork by Marvin Israel, with photography by Michael Wilderman. The title typeface is Photo-Lettering’s Halloween. Read more about its origins in last year’s post.

[More info on Discogs]

On the back, the religious statement by Lancaster is set in all-caps Lightline Gothic. “Stereo 2003” uses Neuland licht, and the track list and credits are in Helvetica. The Vortex logo (not part of this design) features Futura Black.

Lords of the Earth is the title of Jules Loh’s history of the Navajo, published in 1971 by Crowell-Collier Press with a foreword by Peter MacDonald, Chairman or the Navajo Tribal Council.

For the jacket design, Walter Harper combined stacked and interlocked Trooper Roman with equally tight-spaced caps from News Gothic and a photograph of Tsé Bii’Ndzisgaii – Monument Valley. The interior design is uncredited. It uses Neuland licht with Futura Light for the title page and chapter beginnings. The text typeface is Rudolph Ruzicka’s Primer.

“The home-made illustration and the handling of the words “Christmas” and “Greetings” to suggest starbeams feature this card by Emil Georg Sahlin, Buffalo”

Lichte Neuland, or Neuland Inline, was first cast by the Klingspor foundry in Offenbach, Germany, in 1928. Here it can be seen in early use for the 1929 Christmas card by Julia & Emil Georg Sahlin. The card was reproduced in the February 1930 issue of the Inland Printer. It was originally printed in color.

Emil Georg Sahlin was born on April 22, 1895, in Lund, Sweden, and emigrated to the United States. He worked at the Roycroft Print Shop in East Aurora, New York, together with his older brother Axel Edward Sahlin (1877–1956). The two brothers later were employed as compositors at the Aries Press in Eden, New York. In 1928, Emil left Aries to join Alex in the first typographic service in Buffalo and also continued his own venture, the Paradise Press, which he operated until his death in April 1983.

For a long time, URW Nueland was the only digital interpretation of Rudolf Koch’s design to include the Inline style. In December 2023, Poem published Koch Lichte Grotesk for this year’s centenary of Neuland. Designed by Edvinas Žukauskas and Jérôme Knebusch, it’s an accurate revival of the original 12 pt Cicero size.

Dorothy Divers wrote and designed this Christian book about a boy named Pedro at a time when Latin American kids in the US rarely saw themselves in books. The design was selected as one of 84 books in the AIGA’s Children’s Books 1953–1954, which judged on “typographic and artistic merit”. While Divers’ cover title is presumably hand lettered, it is so reminiscent of Neuland licht I thought the typeface deserved mention here. The text is set in Vogue, a geometric sans in the Futura tradition, but born in the U.S. While its initial purpose was for the pages of Vogue magazine, it also has a humility and subtle playfulness that works well for young readers.

Divers’ papers are held at the University of Minnesota:

Divers was born May 22, 1919 in Valley City, North Dakota. She worked as an artist at Augsburg Publishing House before graduating from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she later taught art for 29 years. She died November 22, 2003.

This is the book Let’s Find Out About Halloween, written by Paulette Cooper, illustrated by Errol Le Cain, and first published by Franklin Watts in March 1972.

The title is set in Neuland, with “Halloween” in a two-color setting featuring Neuland licht. Author and illustrator credits are in Optima Bold.

Title page.

Cover from a 1975 edition by Reader’s Digest Services, Inc., Pleasantville, NY.

Title page from a 1975 edition by Reader’s Digest Services, Inc., Pleasantville, NY.

Neuland licht (or Inline) on the cover of the first edition of Imaro. Published by DAW Books in 1981, the fantasy novel written by Charles R. Saunders “may have been one of the first forays into the sword and sorcery genre by a Black author.” [Wikipedia] Imaro is set in the fantasy world of Nyumbani, an alternate Africa. Its eponymous hero has been dubbed the “Black Tarzan”. Saunders died in May 2020, at the age of 73. Locus credits the pioneering Black science fiction writer “as the founder of the ‘sword and soul’ subgenre, combining African history, culture, and mythology with sword-and-sorcery tropes.”

See Rob Giampietro’s essay “New Black Face” (2004) about how Neuland (and Lithos) came “to signify Africans and African-Americans, regardless of how a designer uses them, and regardless of the purpose for which their creators originally intended them”.

The cover art is by Ken Kelly.

[More info on ISFDB]

The blurb on the back cover is set in center-aligned Goudy Oldstyle.

Source: www.popsike.com Photo: Haight Street Records. License: All Rights Reserved.

This best-of record by Dick Dale & The Del-Tones was compiled by Kip Brown and released by Rhino Records in 1986, licensed from “own your music” Dick Dale. Art direction and design by Don Brown, with photography courtesy of the Michael Ochs Archives.

Rudolf Koch’s Neuland (1923) and especially the inline Neuland licht (1928, here in a two-color treatment) were probably chosen for their association with (faux) Tiki culture and, by extension, surfing. All smaller text is set in the bold style of ITC Kabel, Victor Caruso’s 1970s reinterpretation of Koch’s Kabel (1927).

Source: www.ebay.co.uk Photo: cover-music. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.ebay.co.uk Photo: cover-music. License: All Rights Reserved.

Well, that’s quite the J there.

Universal Impex is a “leading distributor of Caribbean and South Asian foods, seasonings, sauces, and other products including the Cool Runnings, British Class and Mekong brands.”

The typographic source of the logo lettering for the Jurassic Park franchise is not clear, but it is probably derived from Neuland licht (digital as Nueland Inline). Sandy Collora designed the original logo (reusing the T. rex skeleton silhouette from Chip Kidd’s book cover design) which has remained fairly consistent with amendments for each of the films, including the fourth in the series, Jurassic World. The titles in this teaser trailer use Decotura Inline.

Babylon by Bus is a live album released in 1978. Its cover came with a special design feature. Wikipedia:

The windows of the bus on the front cover were cut out, revealing part of the inner sleeve. As this was a double album, the listener had a choice of four different scenes to view through the windows.

Try to do that with a jewel case, not to mention with an iTunes jpeg!

The letters on the cover appear to be painted, but closely modeled after the tube-like Pluto.
Art direction and graphics by Neville Garrick. Tour photos by Junior Marvin, Kate Simon, Laurie Lewis, Neville Garrick.

[More info on Discogs]