Joni Mitchell & Jackson Browne at Jahrhunderthalle Frankfurt concert poster
Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, both signed to Asylum Records, played the Jahrhunderthalle in Frankfurt, Germany on May 9, 1972. The poster for the concert organized by Lippmann & Rau was designed by Günther Kieser.
For Mitchell’s name, Kieser chose Apollo. This design distinguished by diagonal double braces and curling terminals was possibly inspired by the earlier Flirt (Farmer, c. 1886). Apollo originated in 1902 at the Aktiengesellschaft für Schriftgießerei und Maschinenbau in Offenbach – less than 20 miles east of the concert venue in Frankfurt-Höchst. Kieser used it in all caps, joining the serifs in MI and LL, and filling the space between the double braces with blue. In order to enable tight linespacing, J had to let go off its descender. And H got a completely new form – in the typeface, this character follows the minuscule construction that was common in blackletter, and by extension also in many more-or-less hybrid faces from around 1900.
The rest of the display typography is set in two widths from Windsor, tightly spaced.
2 Comments on “Joni Mitchell & Jackson Browne at Jahrhunderthalle Frankfurt concert poster”
I wonder what the giant woman-eating cat is about. A reference to the lyrics of Mitchell’s “Hunter”?
Fun fact: three of the typefaces for which we posted in-use examples today, Apollo, Primitive and Neptun, appeared together on the same page of Petzendorfers Schriftenatlas, Neue Folge, a type and lettering compendium published between 1903 and 1905.
All three faces have double lines in some of the letters (for Neptun, see the diagonal crossbar in A and H).
This isn’t were the similarities end, though: in the 1960s, they all were adopted for phototypesetting as part of the Morgan Press Collection by Headliners. A decade later, they were all added to Letraset’s Letragraphica range for dry transfer lettering: first Primitive (before 1976), and then Apollo and Neptun in 1978.