Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein (Scribner’s)
Dust jacket (front)
First edition of Red Planet, a 1949 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein about students at boarding school on the planet Mars.
Cover art and interior illustrations by Clifford Geary. The reversed all-caps typography on the dust jacket pairs Warren Chappell’s Lydian (1938) with Futura. The cover exclusively uses the iconic sans serif designed by Paul Renner and first cast by the Bauer foundry in the late 1920. Technically, it might also be Intertype’s recutting under the original name (1939), or Spartan (1939), which was cut cooperatively by ATF and Linotype, and “is almost indistinguishable from Futura”, according to Mac McGrew.
Cover and spine
On the title page, Futura is complemented by another early geometric sans serif: The light style used for “A Colonial Boy From Mars” and the illustrator credit is from Vogue. This Futura follower was released by Intertype in 1930. Here it’s easily distinguishable by the long bar in G and the M with vertical stems. Intertype offered alternates that stay closer to Renner’s design, though.
The back and the inner flaps of the jacket additionally feature Lydian Cursive. The blurb is typeset in ATF’s Bookman Oldstyle.
