The Dog Beneath the Skin by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood
The Dog Beneath the Skin, or Where is Francis? A Play in Three Acts, by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, was the first Auden-Isherwood collaboration and an important contribution to English poetic drama in the 1930s. It was published in 1935 and first performed by the Group Theatre in 1936.
This is the jacket for the first edition by Faber and Faber from 1935. Note the change from positive to negative. The open slab serif is Monotype’s Rockwell Shadow, which was released the year before. It’s a follower of Beton licht, designed by Heinrich Jost for Bauer in 1931.
The same basic design was also used for the first American edition by Random House, see the last image. However, it seems that Rockwell Shadow was not available at the printer in the U.S., so they substituted the face with Beton licht a.k.a. Beton Open. The differences are most striking in Beton’s O (straight vertical segments in the counter), G (with beard), A (single-sided top serif), or K (curved leg). Both versions exhibit a gap between ‘A’ and ‘T’, as the typesetter didn’t bother to kern the metal sorts.
