Walden and “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau, Collier
In 1968, Collier Books commissioned Seymour Chwast with the cover design for an edition that brings together the two famous works by Henry David Thoreau, his memoir Walden (1854) and the essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (1849).
Chwast chose to depict a scene from life in the woods, or rather, life at the pond: it prominently features one of the bullfrogs, who, as mentioned in chapter V on solitude, “trump to usher in the night.”
For the typography, he specified an all-caps setting of Halftone for “Walden”. This typeface was shown in the 1893 specimen of Marder, Luse & Co., a type foundry based in Chicago. Originally evenly distributed, the horizontal shading here tapers out towards the top. The sturdy serif with the dark caps is Consort’s Bold Condensed style.
Thoreau was born on this day in 1817. Two hundred eight years later, civil disobedience is still urgently called for.
