Evin Aghassi – Mometa D’Ata cassette cover
Ugly-yet-intriguing artwork for a likely bootleg of a cassette by the beloved Assyrian-American crooner, probably from the mid-1980s. The blurry reproduction (on photographic paper) makes the font used in the Bianca & Brynner Production logo ambiguous, but there’s a strong suggestion of Engravers Old English, which at least one other Assyrian cassette (Jermain Tamraz’s Unite + Build) from the same era and area code clearly uses.
As for the text on the front flap (bottom), it is written in Assyrian (AKA Syriac), a Semitic language still spoken by over a million people, a large share of whom live in California and Illinois. Although there couldn’t have been many Assyrian/Syriac typefaces available in the US in the 1980s, there is unsurprisingly little information on the subject. Monotype and Linotype offered Syriac typefaces but neither appear to match this example. Those interested may find the answer in J.F. Coakley’s The Typography of Syriac: A Historical Catalogue of Printing Types, 1537–1958.
Artist name and title, track list, and small print use ITC Souvenir. The stacked shaded caps for “Evin” are from Profil.
