Canned Heat – Vintage album art
Vintage is the sixth album by Canned Heat, with material that was recorded already four years prior to its release in 1970. Maybe that’s why The Graffiteria opted for a cover design that interprets the band name in a quite literal way.
The Art Nouveau caps are from Battleship. This was Photo-Lettering’s name for their revival of a typeface that started life at the French foundry of Peignot & Fils. It’s shown in their 1897 specimen under the generic name Modern Style. The design is characterized by a mix of top-heavy and bottom-heavy glyphs, with H and N following the minuscule construction.
Battleship was first shown in 1962 in PLINC’s Art Nouveau Xenotypes 1895–1905. The letter V is different from the French original. This could be a change introduced in the revival, but I think it’s more likely that the cover designers created the new glyph ad hoc: after all, the original V is a little tipsy, and doesn’t lend itself to tight letterspacing. The starting point apparently was an upside-down A. This way, both lines feature two letters with a double crossbar, making the setting more harmonious.
The band name in Battleship also appears on the physical can shown in a vault on the back cover. Track list and credits were composed on an IBM Selectric, using its proportional typewriter adaptation of Univers.
