A Scatter of Stardust by E.C. Tubb (Ace)
A rare sighting of the pre-digital Cooper Nouveau Swash 7! The bolder variant, Swash 10, was much more popular back in the day. At least that’s what I have to assume from the examples we have documented on Fonts In Use so far.
Cooper Nouveau was drawn by Dave West around 1966. Photo-Lettering’s One Line catalog from 1971 shows three styles; the upright Cooper Nouveau – an amorphous take on Cooper Black – and the italic Cooper Nouveau Swash in two weights named 7 and 10. The bold weight was copied by Lettergraphics in or before 1969 as Funky. Letraset’s Lazybones from 1972 seems to be heavily inspired by it, too.
After House Industries had acquired the Photo-Lettering assets in 2003, they invited West’s namesake Dave Foster to digitize Cooper Nouveau. For some reason, the revival covers the lesser known light style only. It was made available around 2015 through photolettering.com, a site that reimagined the original PLINC experience of ordering settings of exclusive alphabet designs for the digital age. Despite this marvelous idea, the service apparently didn’t really catch on, as it has been retired a while ago. In November 2020, the digital Cooper Nouveau was added to the retail library of House Industries and made available for conventional licensing.
A Scatter of Stardust is “a skyful of science fantasy gems” by E.C. Tubb (1919–2010). It was published as Ace Double 79975, together with Technos by the same author. The cover art is by Karel Thole (1914–2000).
