Nature book series, Edice Planeta
Zelená kuchyně (1988) by Jan Jeník, Václav Větvička, and Sergej Michajlovič Skornjakov, with illustrations by Edita Plicková
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Czechoslovak publisher Lidové nakladatelství brought out a series of nature books in their Edice Planeta imprint. Zelená kuchyně (“Green kitchen”) is about vegetables and edible plants and Zelení ježci (“Green hedgehogs”) about cacti, while Zelený domov (“Green home”) deals with houseplants and Klenoty přírody (“Jewels of nature”) with minerals.
The cover designs are by Milan Albich (1925–2000), a painter, illustrator, and graphic artist from Krupina, Slovakia. He rendered the titles in ITC Serif Gothic. in all-lowercase letters from the Black weight, likely using the Letraset adaptation for dry transfer lettering. Unlike Mecanorma’s – or the official digitization, for that matter – this version includes the alternate glyphs, see for example the descending forms for z and k, the spurless r, and the tailed t.
Albich must have been fond of this typographic style: he also used it for a catalog of his own drawings and paintings in 1987.
A sheet of 48pt Serif Gothic Black, issued by Letraset in 1980 as LG3603 in their Letragraphica range. Note the alternates for aefkrstzEL and the pile of combining diacritics at the bottom.
Zelení ježci (1989) by Stanislav Peleška and Valerij Dmitrijevič Lobko, with illustrations by Jiřina Kaplická and František Severa
Zelený domov (1990) by Galina Tavlinova and Jan Dienstbier, with illustrations by Zdeněk Berger
Klenoty přírody (1990) by Vladimír Bouška and Vitalij Ippolitovič Sobolevskij, illustrated by Adolf Absolon
