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“No More War” – Avant Garde magazine call for entries

Contributed by Stephen Coles on Jul 24th, 2012. Artwork published in .
“No More War” – Avant Garde magazine call for entries
Source: www.flickr.com License: All Rights Reserved.

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No More War? This ‘call for entries’ announcement is pure Lubalin: he juggles Victorian playbill typography with a sly reference to the U.S. flag, yet the graphic formul ation is late 1960s modern. The list of judges is an unusual fusion of design and art world luminaries. Here shown in recreated poster format.

The sans is Anzeigen Grotesk. The slab is Lubalin’s lettering referencing typefaces like Egyptienne.

2 Comments on ““No More War” – Avant Garde magazine call for entries”

  1. Clarendon Italian, (40-line), as shown in the Morgan Press catalog

    I think I found the source of the large wood type in the poster. It’s shown in a Morgan Press catalog. In the early 1960s the Morgan brothers had access to a lot of wood type and made stats of the letters available to designers on request. I’m pretty sure that Lubalin/Carnase ordered the letters from them. The match to Morgan is nearly identical. The typeface is unnamed in the catalog but David Shields identified it as a Clarendon Italian style, popular in the 19th century. It does differ from the French Clarendon/Clarendon No 1 by being a little wider.

    Sample of Clarendon Italian: rrk.finearts.utexas.edu/?dt…

  2. A wonderful find! Thank you for sharing, Sasha.

    It was Headliners International in New York who, in 1963, had acquired the rights to reproduce the 4,000 antique wood and old foundry types from the Morgan Press Collection. Two catalogs, beautifully designed by John Alcorn, were published in 1965 and 1968. David of the Peculiar Manicule has scans of several pages.

    A general Headliners catalog from 1978 lists more than 200 of the Morgan Press faces that made it to film, including a few that are similar to the W-637 that you posted here. W-114 is a decorated version with open lower halves, W-117 is solid but narrower (like French Clarendon), W-126 is a contoured variant.

    The great thing about the transfer to film was of course that one could now scale, stretch, and distort the liberated letterforms at will, as Alcorn did for the vignette on the back of the catalogs.

    Back cover of More Morgan (Vol. 2), 1968. Design by John Alcorn. Scan: The Peculiar Manicule.

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