The Pump House Gang by Tom Wolfe
Eightway is a variation on Thorowgood’s classic Sans Serif Shaded which was first shown in 1839 as Sans Surryphs Shaded. Designed by Milton Glaser with George Leavitt, Eightway is distinguished by a more compact build with straight-sided rounds – and by the fact that it comes in variants with eight different shadow directions.
As the capitals of the Latin alphabet tend to be more busy to the right – think E or R – signpainters traditionally add the shadow on the left: this way, they need fewer brushstrokes and get the job done more quickly. In type design, such considerations of speed don’t play a big role. Once implemented in a typeface, the designed glyphs can be reproduced again and again. In consequence, the vast majority of shaded typefaces opt for the more elaborate shadow to the right, see for example Broadcast, Beton licht, Umbra, Profil, Phoebus, Forum II, etc.
Here’s another example of Eightway used by Glaser himself, for the first-edition jacket of The Pump House Gang. In this 1968 collection of essays and articles, Tom Wolfe documents the 1960s counterculture of the USA in general and New York in particular.
Most of the text on the back and the inner flaps is set in Electra.
Picador’s 2022 softcover edition reuses the first-edition jacket, albeit with Helvetica in place of News Gothic.
2 Comments on “The Pump House Gang by Tom Wolfe”
I was browsing through Flickr and came across this image and another, which made me think of Eightway. Granted, Eightway could be inspired by Sans Shaded and other shaded sans-serifs in general, but this specimen comes really close to it.
Both are taken from Specimens of Printing Types, Plain and Ornamental, Borders, Cuts, Rules, Dashes, &c. from the Foundry of L. Johnson & Co. (1857).
That’s an excellent link! Thanks, Reybach. Yes, the Six-Line Pica Gothic Meridian Shaded is indeed a good deal closer to Eightway. Here’s a comparison to Eightway Shaded South as used for a 1972 paperback cover:
The Six-Line Pica Gothic Meridian Shaded has a shorter middle bar in E, a less wide L, a lower counter in A, and closed counters in D and O. Despite these small differences, the overall look is very close to Eightway South Shaded.