In 1971, Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaría played the Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland. Atlantic Records brought out an album with a live recording of the concert. Haig Adishian used Bifur for the cover, alongside all-caps Kabel and a photo by Tom Hanley.

[More info on Discogs]

Ragtime

From Paul Dini & Chip Kidd’s Batman Animated (1998):

These imaginatively rendered title cards were a high point of each Batman episode. While some (like “Harley’s Holiday” and “Time out of Joint”) were character portraits, most often the cards depicted an emotional impression of the given episode’s theme. According to Eric Radomski, who designed many of the cards, “Going with the overall retro-forties feel we were giving the show, we wanted to treat the episodes as mini-movies. The title cards allowed us to create great drama in a very subtle fashion. It was a process of trying to capture what the overall episode was, and not just show a scene or moment from it.”

Most of the title cards of Batman: The Animated Series’ first season (which first aired in 1992–1993) use fonts that were available from Letraset.

See also the post on the series’ logos.

Engravers Old English

Pendry Script

Rundfunk

Commercial Script and Compacta Italic

Pendry Script

Cable (Kabel) Light

Univers 49

Brody

Univers 49

Peignot Medium

Alpin Gothic

Plaza

Pendry Script and Compacta

Windsor Bold Outline

Compacta

Plaza

Peignot Medium

Brush Script

Microgramma Medium Extended

Mistral

Compacta Bold Outline

Univers 49

Goudy Handtooled

Mistral

ITC Benguiat

Brody

Univers 49

Plaza and Univers 49

Mistral

Laser

Univers 49

Stencil Bold

Univers 49

Univers 49

Papyrus

Berling Bold

Mistral

Mistral

Ragtime

Berling Bold

LCD Outline

Cloister Bold

Shatter

Helvetica Extra Light and Medium

Goudy Extra Bold

Freestyle Script and Flash

Plaza Inline

City Medium

Murray Hill Bold

Plaza and Univers 49

Ragtime

Tarragon

Compacta Outline

Titus Medium

Augustea Open

Cortez

Colin Brignall’s Superstar used together with light Kabel caps for the German sleeve of “Let’s All Chant”, a 1977/1978 disco hit written by Michael Zager and Alvin Fields, and performed by the Michael Zager Band.

There Is More to Life is a gospel album by George Beverly Shea (1909–2013), released in 1970 by RCA Records and featuring a blend of traditional hymns and more contemporary gospel sounds.

[More info on Discogs]

In this 1974 book, Whitney Balliett (1926–2007) profiles Alec Wilder and nine related artists. The texts were originally published in The New Yorker for which Balliett served as a jazz critic and book reviewer over a period of forty-seven years.

The uncredited designer used ITC Busorama Bold for the main title. It appears with several of its alternates: the compact variants for E and F, the R with concave leg, and the top-heavy forms for S and &. Busorama is supported by Kabel Light.

Back cover. Happy World Ampersand Day! The photo credit for Geoffrey James uses a light weight of Venus Extended with a wide J.

Vol 4 is the fourth studio album released by the band Black Sabbath, in September of 1972. It features several classic tracks, including “Tomorrow’s Dream”, “Snowblind”, and “Supernaut”.

The front cover features an interesting use of Gadget which was released approximately a year earlier by Alphabet Photosetting. The 4 is modified.

The monochrome photograph of Ozzy Osbourne with hands raised and two fingers extended was taken during a Black Sabbath concert at Birmingham Town Hall in January 1972 by Keef a.k.a. Keith Macmillan. Read more about the Gadget typeface and the typography of other album covers by Black Sabbath in Nick’s blog post.

During the band's final show dubbed “Back to the Beginning”, which took place on July 5th 2025, the band called back to the typeface used on this 1972 album, by re-using it for the concert branding, see this dedicated post.

Track list and credits on the gatefold are set in light Kabel, with a heading in bold Gill Sans. The small print is in News Gothic.

Back cover with the track listing in very small Helvetica caps

Sandwiched between (and some would say overshadowed by) Dance to the Music and Stand!, Sly and the Family Stone’s Life continued the group’s brand of psychedelic-tinged funk-rock-soul. For the US market, the album produced only one single – the title track “Life” backed with “M’Lady” – which had little impact on the charts.

Above a photomontage of the band as a theater full of people, the uncredited designer chose to juxtapose the filigreed 19th-century Ornamented No. 1539 with the sleeker, more modern Palisade Graphic. For the bichromatic setting of the former, the specific font in use probably is the phototype adaptation made by Headliners in 1964 as part of their Morgan Press Collection.

[More info on Discogs]

Billboard ad (July 13, 1968, p. 19). This time the album/single's title has added (handdrawn?) quotes. The other fonts present are Folio Extra Bold and Kabel.

Hot Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music is the English-language translation of Hugues Panassié’s Le Jazz Hot (1934) – which discusses the music genre of swing music and its differences from Jazz music – originally translated from the French by Eleanor & Lyle Dowling for M. Witmark & Sons in 1934. Shown here is the the dust jacket of the rare British 1936 print by Cassell in London.

The purely typographic design exclusively uses typefaces from Rudolf Koch: the multiline Prisma for the title, supplemented by Kabel with the italic and Black styles.

This telephone directory for East Chicago, Indiana (with Indiana Harbor) was published in March 1941 by Rueben H. Donnelley, Chicago, for the Illinois Bell Telephone Company.

The head is set in Kabel (or possibly Monotype’s copy, Sans Serif). The humble star of the show is Bell Gothic. Designed specifically for AT&T to set telephone directories, Chauncey H. Griffith’s typeface was first issued by Mergenthaler Linotype in 1938. It’s here combined with Century Oldstyle. Index headlines appear to be in Cheltenham.

Northeast Airlines began service to Los Angeles on October 1, 1969. Los Angeles would remain the airline’s only west coast destination until it was acquired by Delta Airlines in 1972.

From the George M. Foster Timetable Collection at Northwestern University's Transportation Library.

Suddenly … Smashingly … Your look comes to life!
First and only Brush-on Makeup with Shades from Beige to Blush

Tightly spaced Kabel used in two weights in a 1965 advert for Brush-Alive makeup, featuring pink brush-on makeup for the i dot and the exclamation mark.

Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy is a handbook for the mental health practitioner by psychologist J. William Worden. First published in 1982 with a cover featuring Optima, this is the fifth edition published in May 2018. Most text is set in Kabel, with faux small caps for the author’s name.

Punk poet laureate and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Patti Smith is known for fusing rock and poetry in her work. She also won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids in 2010. In November 2020, the American artist and her band were scheduled to perform at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The shows were eventually postponed to October 2021. The photo is by Steven Sebring. Text on the concert poster is set in caps from Kabel and Kabel Black.

Landscape variant

Fonts from the Flea Market #1364

Two sans serifs with angled terminals and roots in the 1920s, one very light and one rather bold: Kabel Light (1927) and Novel Gothic (1928) are contrasted on the German sleeve for Joe Cocker’s 1971 hit single “High Time We Went”.

The American version by A&M Records shown below uses a larger crop of the same stylized photograph, and exclusively Novel Gothic.

Joe Cocker (1944–2014) would have turned eighty on May 20, 2024.

[More info on Discogs]

First edition jacket for The Band of the Red Hand, an early book by Margaret Rau, who was born 1913 in Swatow, Guangdong, China, and later lived in the United States. The “Chinese mystery story” is directed at children and was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1938, with cover art by Joseph Low.

The title typography combines Signal with the shaded caps of Plastica, another 1930s Berthold release. It could also be Ludlow’s Umbra, which is virtually identical for the letters in question.

The cover for L’Esercito Italiano: Poesia Armata (English: The Italian Army: Poetry of the Army), a 1942 book written by F.T. Marinetti and published by Cenacolo in Rome. The theme of the book revolves around poetry and the Italian army.

The title of the book is a wonky rendering of Motor, Karl Sommer’s “speedy” display counterpart to his more popular Dynamo: on top of the letterforms generally being much rougher, the T lacks its top serif.

There’s also some actual type thrown into the mix: “Poesia Armata” is a quintessentially Italian geometric sans: Alessandro Butti’s Semplicità Nero. The remaining two faces are Rudolf Koch’s Kabel Bold and Landi. Just like Semplicità, this slab serif series was available from Nebiolo. Landi was their version of Welt-Antiqua. In the light weight known as Chiara seen here, some glyphs including A G R were modified from Hans Wagner’s original design for Ludwig & Mayer.

Grandparent’s Delight is the name of my well-stocked home bar, and in the years since I developed a cane sugar allergy, Grandparent’s Delight has also lent its name to a range of housemade decoctions, infusions, and liqueurs designed as cane-free alternatives to commercial products. A set of labels were designed to give these products a more legitimate presence on the liquor shelf. To complete the illusion, the labels fall into several different visual sub-brands under the umbrella of Grandparent's Delight:

• The Fernets: lightly sweetened liqueurs principally flavored with saffron and bitter aloes. Labels are set in Beaux Arts Didot and Polliwog.

• The Génépis: complex, high-proof herbal liqueurs flavored with the alpine herb génépi. Labels are set in Hesse Antiqua (including one of Hesse Antiqua's ornaments) and a coarse optical size of Kyrios.

• The “single-notes”: pure infusions of a single ingredient, typically fruit. Labels are set in FF Bauer Grotesk.

• The Grandparent’s Delight house brand: a catch-all category for multi-ingredient recipes. Labels are haphazardly set in Bild. (Spot the customized cedilla.)

• Aquavit, a nordic infusion of caraway, uses Kabel and (what else?) Kumlien.

A workmanlike universal label for the back side of each bottle uses Pitch and Pitch Sans and provides space for detailed notes on the batch.

A ticket for a Groundhog Dance held on the day before Groundhog Day in 1934 by the El Hezi Temple No. 215 of the Dramatic Order of the Knights of Khorassan (D.O.K.K.), which is associated with the Knights of Pythias. The El Hezi Temple was a local D.O.K.K. group in western Pennsylvania.

Groundhog Dance
Given by
El Hezi Temple No. 215, D.O.K.K.
Thursday, February 1, 1934 --- From 9 to ?
New K. of P. Home
Admission---75c Per Couple

“Groundhog Dance” uses Nicolas Cochin with faux small caps (or with initial caps from a larger size). The rest of the ticket is set in Kabel.

Book jacket with banderole

Why was Marsden killed twice?

First edition of a detective novel featuring Scotland Yard's Inspector Slade, penned by Leonard Gribble (1908–1985). The book was published by Doubleday, Doran and Co. for the Crime Club in 1930.

Neuland was first cast by the Gebr. Klingspor foundry in Offenbach, Germany, in 1923. Rudolf Koch’s rugged sans was a major hit with American book designers. Especially in the 1930s, its coarse letterforms appeared on numerous jacket designs. The designers didn’t always use Neuland directly. For one, being an overseas product, it was not exactly straightforward to obtain. Domestic foundries like Baltotype and Chicago cut copies, but my understanding is that that happened only later. In 1930, one had to place an order with the Continental Typefounders Association. Secondly, it was quicker and cheaper to simply render the letterforms by hand. After all, Neuland was advertised as a “hand cut design”, and, with its straight lines and integral inconsistencies, was easier to mimick than most other type styles.

The jacket for the Crime Club mystery is a case in point. All text surrounding the blood-red hand is manually drawn. It’s clear that Neuland was the direct inspiration, as one can see in the open C, the narrow S, the stemmed U, the diagonal terminals and other details. For the question at the bottom left, the unknown designer (who signed the work with “E”) invented matching lowercase letters.

Neuland was caps-only. Koch did start work on a lowercase, though. This version was never released by Klingspor. Only this year, Edvinas Žukauskas and Jérôme Knebusch included it in their Koch Grotesk, a faithful digital revival of all size-specific cuts of the original Neuland. Koch Grotesk was released by Poem in May 2023, just in time for the typeface’s centennial, together with a pamphlet featuring an essay by Dan Reynolds. Later today, at 4pm CET, Reynolds, Žukauskas and Knebusch will give a lecture at ENSAD Nancy, France. “Making/Remaking Neuland” will be livestreamed.

Not into lettering derived from typefaces? Fair enough. There are real fonts in this use, too: the green banderole features three typefaces, all of which were new at the time. The Bodoni on the spine part appears to be Monotype #375 from 1930. The fat style used for the title is Ultra Bodoni from 1928, both (adaptations of works) by Morris F. Benton. The geometric sans-serif caps look like they’re from Grobe Kabel (1928), another design by Koch. Considering the location and the fact that the other fonts are from Monotype, it may also be Monotype’s generically named copy, Sans Serif Bold (1930).

Front and spine portions of jacket

The title on the front cover is set in caps from Futura Bold, which was first cast two years before, in 1928.

Detail of the banderole with the Crime Club gunman at the right

When Photo-Lettering added Craig Mierop’s Ginger Snap to their library in 1969, it was an instant hit: this best-of compilation by Eric Burdon & The Animals is already the seventh in-use example from the year of its release documented on Fonts In Use.

Art director David Krieger specified the shaded C style, with the open letter bodies filled in red. The back of the sleeve feature a reversed black-and-white setting.

[More info on Discogs]