A teach-yourself-to-play-keyboard book that came with a Baldwin Orga-sonic electric organ. It has a Mississippi Riverboat theme throughout and uses 19th-century typefaces to match.

From Wikipedia:

At the end of 1970, the First Edition had their seventh Top 40 hit with the Kin Vassy-penned “Heed the Call”. Another song about the need for brotherhood, it was seen as an uptempo counterpart to the balladry of “Tell It All Brother.”

[More info on Discogs]

Comstock, a contoured variant of Standard Gothic, was used in yellow caps for the debut album by The Kingston Trio, released by Capitol Records.

According to Wikipedia,

The Kingston Trio was one of the most prominent groups of the era’s folk-pop boom, which they kick-started in 1958 with the release of the Trio's eponymous first album and its hit recording of “Tom Dooley”, which became a number one hit and sold over three million copies as a single. The Trio released nineteen albums that made Billboard’s Top 100, fourteen of which ranked in the top 10, and five of which hit the number 1 spot.

[More info on Discogs]

Cover for a recording of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 6 In D Major, Opus 60, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with guest conductor Witold Rowicki (1914–1989) and released in the Philips World Series.

The main typeface is Soutache. Originally designed around 1875 by Julius Herriet, Sr. for the Bruce Type Foundry, this Tuscan with ornamental contour was revived in the 1960s as part of VGC’s T.J. Lyons Antique Type Collection. It can here be seen with letterforms that were optically distorted to fit a curved shape. While the letter bodies are printed in color, the contour is added in black. Comstock for Rowicki’s name got the same bichromatic treatment.

Additional fonts in use include Folio extrafett (for “No” and “Symphony Orchestra”, Copperplate Gothic, and, for the blurb at the bottom, Univers. The Philips World Series logo is in Binner, see this previous post.

Zbigniew Jastrzebski provided the illustration with 19 watercolor miniatures arranged in a salon-style hang. The scribbled frames echo Soutache’s contour. No designer is credited for the typography.

[More info on Discogs]

Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg is an album recorded by Jane Birkin together with Serge Gainsbourg in 1968. It was first released by Fontana Records in June 1969, including the hit single “Je t’aime… moi non plus”. On later pressings, the controversial duet was replaced by “La Chanson De Slogan”.

The contoured caps are from a typeface named Comstock. The text on the back cover is set in various styles from Folio, a grotesk that went under the name Caravelle in France. The photography is by Jean D’Hughes and an unnamed artist credited as “X”.

[More info on Discogs]

Jane Birkin died today at the age of 76. RIP.

1975 pressing without “Je t’aime… moi non plus” (but with unchanged cover art)

Cover for an album of instrumental jazz music by composer and arranger Hal Mooney (1911–1995), released in 1960 in the Series 2000 by Time Records. The design by Murray Stein depicts a flute and a representation of the acoustic waves, comprising ellipsoidal lines that resemble a guilloché pattern, or the geometric drawings made with a Spirograph. The vibrations are also echoed in the typeface choice, albeit in a less dynamic form: Comstock is distinguished by a thin contour that runs around the letterforms.

[More info on Discogs]

Suck no. 1, September 1969. Prices set in Annonce.

From Wikipedia:

Suck: The First European Sex Paper was an underground pornographic magazine that celebrated free love and queer sexuality. Founded in London in 1969, its collaborators included Jim Haynes, William Levy, Heathcote Williams, Germaine Greer, and Jean Shrimpton. The United Kingdom banned the publication prior to its first issue.

Most issues were art directed by Willem de Ridder in Amsterdam. He used the “multi-tongued” Sea weed for the magazine’s logo. On several issues, it’s paired with Comstock.

“Suck was sexual revolution, wasn’t it? No, no, no, Suck was a magazine of art and literature with sex as its theme.” – from the complete Bill Levy archive at IISH Amsterdam.

Suck no. 2, March 1970.

Suck no. 3, August 1970.

Suck no. 4, November 1970.

Suck no. 5, May 1971. A smaller logo with redrawn letterform including ball terminals, paired with lowercase Cooper Black Italic for all information. This issue was art directed by Anthon Beeke. The cover photo is by Anna Beeke.

Suck no. 6, October 1971, “Special family issue”. Adults only, kids!

Suck number 7. “SEXPAPER” is set in Cristal.

Suck no. 8 from June 1974 was the last Suck. The letterforms from Sea weed are here shown in yet another hand-drawn rendition. Found in the book Sex Press: la revolution sexuelle vue par la presse underground 1965–1975.

The Werewolf of Washington is a 1973 horror-comedy movie about a press secretary for the US President who becomes a werewolf and terrorizes Washington DC. A partial satire of the then-active Nixon administration, it was directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg and stars Dean Stockwell.

The most common US poster for the movie shows the title in either a manually outlined adaptation of Standard Gothic or a color-separated adaptation of its pre-outlined relative, Comstock. The secondary type is set in Helvetica and Helvetica Condensed.

Debora is a compilation of songs by Tyrannosaurus Rex, released in 1976 in the Star-Power series by German record label Intercord. The sleeve design is by Helmut Hastenteufel, graphic designer from Stuttgart, featuring Black Body by local type designer Peter Steiner, used with its monocular a. The design of the Star-Power series with a logo set in caps from Comstock is credited to Charly Höllering.

[More info on Discogs]

While both film titles on this double feature poster appear to be hand-lettering at first glance, the second one actually is set in a face from Photo-Lettering’s fathomless library. The bold caps that look as if they were coarsely cut from paper are from one of the lesser known designs by Ed Benguiat. It’s shown in Alphabet Thesaurus Vol. 2 (1965) as Benguiat Cinema, with many alternates. Daniel Gauthier made a digitization named IrwinAllen (GautFonts, 2004), sadly without giving credit.

Unbelievable … fantastic
2 science-fiction shockers!
Gozilla’s Revenge
See: Prehistoric monsters crawl out of the hidden depths of the earth and take revenge against the living!
and
War of the Gargantuas
Can a country survive when two Gargantuas battle to the death?
A UPA Productions of America Production. Distributed by Maron Films Limited.

Godzilla’s Revenge is the title of Maron Films’ 1971 U.S. release of All Monsters Attack, (ゴジラ・ミニラ・ガバラ オール怪獣大進撃, lit. “Godzilla, Minilla, and Gabara: All Monsters Attack”) originally released in Japan on December 20, 1969 and distributed by Toho. “The film is often retrospectively considered as one of the worst Godzilla films, although [director Ishirō] Honda had come to consider it as one of his favorites in the series.”

War of the Gargantuas is another a kaiju film directed by Ishirō Honda, known in Japan as フランケンシュタインの怪獣 サンダ対ガイラ (lit.  “Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira”) and originally released on July 31, 1966. Maron Films gave it a theatrical release in the United States on July 29, 1970.

Source: www.abebooks.fr Librairie-Galerie Emmanuel Hutin (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style was first published in 1947. In 1963, Gallimard issued a deluxe hardcover edition. The 99 variations of the same story were typographically interpreted by Robert Massin (professionally known just as Massin), who had started working at Gallimard in 1958, serving as art director since 1960. Additionally included are 33 parallel exercises in style; drawn, painted, and carved by illustrator Jacques Carelman. This magnificient book deserves a post that also shows some of the interior pages and an analysis of the many typefaces in use. For the moment, a look at the cover and the title page will have to do.

The title is presented in four big lines, stacked and justified, with a different typeface for each line. “Exercices” is wrapped in two lines, in capitals from Comstock, a contoured grotesque first cast by the Inland Type Foundry in 1902 and also known under several other names including Astoria; and Didot. The specific version may be Initiales Firmin Didot, a caps-only cut offered by Deberny & Peignot in sizes up to 60pt. The dimensional seriffed letters depicted from an extreme perspective are probably from a 19th-century (wood?) typeface. All attention is ultimately directed to the word “style”. It’s presented in a range of bright colors in what otherwise is a monochrome cover. The bombastic letterforms are taken from a decorated capital alphabet originally shown in Jean Midolle’s lettering sampler Spécimen des écritures modernes (1834–1835) as Romaine (genre arabesque). Later on, after this book was designed, this face was adopted for dry-transfer lettering and inevitably made into a digital font, too.

These four lines are representative for Massin’s predilection for vintage and often expressive typefaces. The three small lines at the bottom are set in a more restrained and also much younger design: Folio was released by the Bauer foundry just a few years earlier, in 1957. The neo-grotesk was sold in France under the name Caravelle.

Source: www.abebooks.fr Librairie Le Feu Follet (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

The title page combines a multitude of typefaces, center-aligned, in a neo-Victorian fashion. The title is set in Didot caps, with a candlestick standing in for Y. The formal script appears to be Calligraphiques noires, issued by Deberny & Peignot in 1928. The shaded slab for “Carelman” is Initiales Compactes Éclairées, Deberny & Peignot’s name for a design that originated at the Bruce Type Foundry in 1865 and is better known as Gold Rush. The other typefaces are unidentified. If you have any insights, let us know in a comment.

In an article for Eye magazine no. 16 vol. 4 (1995), Richard Hollis regards the illustrated edition of Excercices de style as Massin’s “first important single piece of design at Gallimard”:

In attempting ‘a literal expression of the text (mainly limited to the titles),’ Massin displayed his skill with eccentric type forms, supplying each variation of the tale with a heading which suggests the narrative form that follows. Derived from the content, the type style becomes part of the expression of the text’s meaning. The letters are not decoration, but unified text and illustration. Massin’s Exercices de style was a further demonstration of Faucheux’s idea of ‘making connections between the text and its graphic expression.’ Since Faucheux had himself produced a book club version of Exercises de style in 1956, there was, for Massin, an element of rivalry as well as homage in the project.

On PaperPosts, Murray Grigo-McMahon shares several images of the interior pages, taken from a later edition issued by Gallimard in the late 1970s, with a different cover.

In 2007, Phaidon published a monograph of Massin’s work, edited by Laetitia Wolff. For more information about Massin and his œuvre, see also the features on Design Culture, Elisava, and Index Grafik as well as Jan Middendorp’s article for Eye about Massin and the Book.

Massin died February 8, 2020 at the age of 94.

Midolle’s Alphabet Lapidaire Monstre didn’t offer any diacritics, and apparently neither did the reproduction that Karel Vaca had access to. So, like many Czech designers, he made his own Ú.

Publisher: L’Ufficio Moderno, Milan, Italy

12×8.5″, 271 plus ads, English-French-German-Italian

Pubblicità in Italia (Advertising in Italy) is an accurate look at Italian graphic design in 1968-69 including: posters, advertising, catalogs, packaging, trade-marks and more. Introduction by Silvio Ceccato. — Display

I came across this publication at the Estorick Gallery, London. It was part of the exhibition Franco Grignani: Art as Design 1950-1990, which showcased both his art and graphic design works.

The exhibition stated the importance of Gestalt theory on his work. I wonder if this informed the decision to choose this typeface, as the outline creates minimal, but noticable, optical effects dependant on the distance one views it from.

The hairline accents (a in Pubblicità and é in Publicité) are particularly interesting as they optically match the weight of the outline.

Detail of the type on the cover.

n.b. The book was in a glass case which made photographing it a challenge.