The Jackie McLean Quintet with Donald Byrd and Elmo Hope – Lights Out! album art
Contributed by Bryson Stohr
on Sep 13th, 2025. Artwork published in
.
Light’s Out! is a jazz album by the Jackie McLean Quartet, with help from Donald Byrd and Elmo Hope, and was released in 1956 by Prestige Records.
Haymaker Cartoon is used for the main title, with supporting roles from Filmotype Homer and what looks like a somewhat squeezed Filmotype Hemlock or similar with a few alternates. The condensed casual sans is unknown [edit: it’s Hand Lettering 3920 or a version of this design, see comments]. In general, despite the album art’s use of Haymaker Cartoon, the design isn’t as “out of place” as Gil Mellé's Miles Davis cover from the same year.
The back cover is much simpler, pairing Tempo with the similar Vogue.
No designer credited. The cover photography is by Esmond Edwards (1927–2007).
Source: archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.
3 Comments on “The Jackie McLean Quintet with Donald Byrd and Elmo Hope – Lights Out! album art”
The condensed casual sans is from the artype
But I don’t know it’s name.
The image is from the practical handbook on display typefaces
The Digital font is Highlights condensed
Hi John,
I have added the font ID and gave it the name Hand Lettering 3920 for now. That’s the name under which this design was shown in an undated (post-1955) catalog by Cello-Tak.
Your sample is taken from a book titled Practical Handbook on Display Typefaces that was published in 1959. (Please remember to always link to the source if possible – this will save a lot of time.)
From this showing, we learn that the same design – or a very similar one – was carried by Artype as Nos. 1288 (capitals) and 1289 (lowercase). It looks like Artype identified their typefaces by numbers instead of names. Yet another version that I’m aware of is named Chalk, by Formatt.
Artype, Cello-Pak and Formatt were all manufacturers of dry transfer lettering products. I don’t know where the design originated and what it was called originally. As you can see from the captions to other samples in the Practical Handbook on Display Typefaces, the various manufacturers often had versions of virtually the same designs, like Pro-Type No. 1465-K / Typro Skokie / Filmotype Wave, or Pro-Type No. 4315-K / Typro Midinette / Filmotype Arrow. Chances are that successful faces were copied by other manufacturers, directly or indirectly. It’s also possible that lettering artists licensed their designs to more than one manufacturer.
One more thought on the album cover. It’s technically possible that the designer combined three different sources of type*:
1. A setting of the title ordered from Photo-Lettering, Inc. (one couldn’t purchase fonts from PLINC; their business model was typesetting as a service)
2. The output of a Filmotype machine
3. Transfer type
… all brought together in paste up.
From experience and common sense, however, it seems more likely that only two such sources were involved, and possibly even only a single one.
Maybe it’s not Homer and Hemlock after all, but rather look-alikes from one of the sources that also carried a version of the condensed face dubbed Hand Lettering 3920. That would explain why some glyphs don’t quite match the Filmotype specimens I’ve seen (I’m not sure if matching alternates were available).
And we can’t rule out the possibility that the face carried by PLINC as Haymaker Cartoon was also produced by another company, be it as transfer type or for phototypesetting. For that, we’d need to see a whole lot more specimen catalogs from that (short-lived and underdocumented) period.
See the proceedings of a talk given by Peter Bain in 2003 for a good overview of display phototype in New York.
*) The back cover is a whole different matter and was likely produced independently from the front cover. The fonts used for it reveal that two yet again completely different techniques for setting type were used: a Ludlow Typograph and an Intertype machine.