John Coltrane – A Love Supreme album art
Contributed by Rob Hudson
on Apr 2nd, 2023. Artwork published in
January 1965
.
The original LP release has identical front and back covers, designed by George Gray/Viceroy using photography by Bob Thiele and Anzeigen-Grotesk / Neue Aurora IX.
A Love Supreme is a landmark 1965 LP from saxophonist John Coltrane, often considered his masterpiece.
Gatefold with liner notes, designed by Joe Lebow using a painting by Victor Kalin, Fairfield and Freehand. The credits at the bottom are set in Akzidenz-Grotesk with News Gothic.
5 Comments on “John Coltrane – A Love Supreme album art”
Hello,
on the Fairfield page, two links point to a 1940 specimen and a 1955 Fairfield Medium ad.
Between the two dates, the U loses its bar; henceforth it appears rounded in Linotype’s version. To find the original form, you have to look at Bitstream’s Transitional 551, Medium Roman and Italic, which are more faithful (or even Barry Schwartz’s Fanwood).
Despite the release date of the record shown here, the original Fairfield typeface design is still there, proof if any were needed, of its quality!
What is there about this “uncial” variation of this U’s design, any leads or opinions?
The glyph sets in McGrew show that the U in the original Fairfield is stemmed, while it’s stemless in the later Fairfield Medium. And indeed the 1955 ad mentions:
I don’t know about the reasons for revising the U, so I can only speculate. The stemmed form was common with German type designers, see Tiemann-Mediäval, Belwe-Antiqua, Erbar-Mediaeval, Koch-Antiqua (and later also Zapf’s Michelangelo, Sistina, and Palatino Italic). Maybe that’s the “school” that Ruzicka was following initially, but wasn’t convinced anymore by the time he added the Medium, and thus opted for the more conventional form?
When Alex Kaczun drew Linotype’s digital version in 1991, he harmonized the details across the family (that now spanned four weights), and apparently based the U on the Medium.
I tend to agree with you, the U with a stem also seems to me to correspond to the traditional German school.
More broadly, as with the many examples you cite, in reference to medieval calligraphic writing, which has no American roots.
So, to speculate in turn, isn’t it rather linked to the importance of the American market, which ultimately presupposes standardization?
That’s something that happened to Palatino: as I wrote in a previous comment, Zapf revised his design already in the early 1950s. He tamed some of the more calligraphic glyphs, following the preferences of two American designers, W.A. Dwiggins and Franz C. Hess.
Then again, the original Fairfield was already made by a (Czech) American designer for an American company. It would be interesting to know whether there were any user complaints about its stemmed U.
Indeed, this information about the history of Palatino is very interesting, and revealer of the process for meeting demand.
I quickly tried in “identifont” to find fonts with this same stemmed U: aside from scripts, it wasn’t very conclusive.
We should probably have more specific criteria, such as the date or the origin of the creators by country… it’s complicated.
In fact, adding the country (USA, UK) to the main font page in Fonts In Use could be a great idea!