Wilson Pickett – The Midnight Mover album art
Wilson Pickett was a busy man in 1968: The Midnight Mover was his second album released that year, after I’m in Love. The cover design is by Marvin Israel, who had served as freelance art director for Atlantic Records from 1957 to 1963, and also worked with the label on several of their albums in later years.
Israel was a regular customer of Photo-Lettering, Inc., the leading typesetting studio in New York. For The Midnight Mover, he picked Plywood, a face for which Reybach just contributed the first Use – another album from 1968, Sam & Dave’s I Thank You.
The design of Plywood didn’t originate at Photo-Lettering, Inc., though. Like Halloween, Aztec, Cabaret, Razzle Dazzle, and Echo, it’s based on an alphabet sourced from a book published in 1931 in Paris, titled Publicité Vignettes Lettres Chiffres Monogrammes et Rehauts Modernes. With this design and alphabet sampler, “Guérinet publishers captured the fading glory of ‘Modèles de lettres’ from the Romantic period with their Art Déco-inspired collection”, writes Michel Wlassikoff.
The basis for Plywood is one of several “unpublished modern alphabets with numerals”. The open bold geometric sans with triple split shade is titled La Tiercée (“The Trifecta”) and credited to P. Picaud. The designers at PLINC didn’t do much more to it than add some punctuation glyphs (see the ampersand, for example) and give it a more prosaic name. Plywood was added to their catalog in or before 1965. I wouldn’t be surprised if was the inspiration to other faces with a similar effect that were issued by PLINC in the following years, see Montgomery Pousse Cafe, Push Pin Myopic, and Accelera.
The basis for Plywood: La Tiercée by P. Picaud as shown in Publicité Vignettes Lettres Chiffres Monogrammes et Rehauts Modernes, Les Editions Guérinet, Paris, 1931
Detail from the album cover. The W without notches at the bottom and the “lazy S” give away Plywood’s Art Deco roots. Note that the LS pair was spaced so that the “plies” form continuous lines. Unfortunately, the face was used with stretched letterforms, as one can see in the out-of-the-round O.
