Jan DeGaetani & Gilbert Kalish – Mussorgsky: Nursery Cycle / Tchaikovsky: Songs album art
Henrietta Condak’s cover design for a 1985 album by Jan DeGaetani (mezzo-soprano) and Gilbert Kalish (piano) features a number of typographic styles that go back to the late 19th century.
The two composer’s names are in an all-caps Latin with extreme horizontal contrast: while the letterforms are basically monolinear, they’re confined by heavy triangular serifs and wedge-shaped rails at the top and bottom. Rob Roy Kelly’s American Wood Types has a reproduction of Page’s 1882 catalog that shows this design in four variants: 8 Line No. 139, 8 Line No. 138 (bolder), 8 Line No. 141 (with screws at the top and bottom), 8 Line No. 147 (contoured). A phototype adaptation was included in Headliners’ Morgan Press Collection as W-139. Solotype’s 1992 catalog shows it as Bullfrog Extended, alongside the condensed Bullfrog.
Is there something immanently Russian about Bullfrog’s look? Or is it by coincidence that Milton Glaser used it for the cover of Semeinaya khronika, “an autobiographical classic describing the opening of Russia’s eastern frontier”?
The typeface used for “Nursery Cycle” and “Songs” goes under the name Gothic Light Face, and was first shown as wood type by David Knox in his 1858 Specimens of Wood Type and also by William Page in his 1859 specimens. The performer’s names are set on a curving baseline. The typeface, Latin Condensed, was released by Stephenson Blake in England in 1873. Versions of it were also cast by various American foundries.
Other typefaces used in small sizes and on the back cover are ITC Cheltenham (1975), an interpretation of Cheltenham (1902), and Futura (1927).
