Travels in Two Democracies by Edmund Wilson
The first edition of Edmund Wilson’s Travels in Two Democracies uses two weights from Signal. Designed by Walter Wege, this non-kerning informal script was first cast by the Berthold foundry in Berlin. While the title on the book jacket is set in the regular weight from 1931, the cloth cover sports the lighter Script-Signal that was added in 1932. Both times the words are placed on a sloping baseline, counterbalancing the slant of the script letters.
Ralf Herrmann currently is running a campaign to fund the creation of a faithful digitization of all three weights of Signal, including the bold Block-Signal not featured in this use, plus a variable version. If you want to help the project to reach its goal, you can do so for a couple more days, until November 21, 2023.
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) is best known as literary critic, but also was an author of poetry, fiction, memoirs, and more. Travels in Two Democracies is one of his political writings, in which he compares life in the Depression-era United States and in the Soviet Union. The book was published in 1936, a few years after diplomatic relations between the two nations were established – and shortly before Stalin instituted the Great Purge, consolidating power to become a dictator.
The book typography is credited to Robert Josephy. Chances are he designed the jacket and cover as well.
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1 Comment on “Travels in Two Democracies by Edmund Wilson”
See more Signal used in the United States in the 1930s, including the jacket for Erskine Caldwell’s North of the Danube: