Children’s Jokes And Riddles album art
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Bart Solenthaler and tagged with “adlib” and “cooperblack”. License: All Rights Reserved.
Cover for Children’s Jokes And Riddles, recorded by The Rocking Horse Players and Orchestra, featuring Jimmy Nelson (b. 1928), and released by Rocking Horse Records sometime in the 1960s.
3 Comments on “Children’s Jokes And Riddles album art”
That’s a jolly one! “Jokes and Riddles” appears to be lettering, not a typeface. The interlocking caps echo the angular counters of Ad Lib. Filmotype used to have a series of interlocking faces which also have this feature, especially in the bolder members Mason and Newton. Filmotype Maxwell recently was made into an OpenType fonts by Charles Gibbons. See also PLINC’s Koziar Interlock.
Here’s a comparison I made between the one-sample and the digitized version of Filmotype Maxwell
Your comparison shows how the digital Maxwell looks like when used out of the box. By activating/deactivating certain OpenType substitution features, or by manually selecting alternate glyphs, it’s possible to approximate the original sample even more closely.
Filmotype’s interlocking typefaces from the 1960s included several alternates: the one-line sample shows two different forms each for D, I and S. I don’t know about Maxwell specifically, but the similar Omaha had up to six glyphs per character. Letters like J, Q, X and Z came in a single form only, but others had one, two, three (I, O, R, Y), four (T), or even five (E) alternates.
This pales in comparison to the digitization produced by Charles Gibbons: it includes more than 2,000 glyphs. This number is partly due to its much larger language support, with many accented characters missing from the analog version. But it also offers lots more stylistic alternates. The specimens show twenty different forms for the letter H, for example, and mention “over 5 million automatic interlocking letter combinations”.