Althea & Donna – “Uptown Top Ranking” / “Calico Suit” German single cover
The German sleeve for Althea & Donna’s 1978 hit single “Uptown Top Ranking” features four typefaces that were all available from Letraset at the time. None of them was an original creation by the English manufacturer of dry transfer lettering, though: Kabel Black (“Top Ten in England”) and Futura (“An Original Lightning Recording”) are adaptations of geometric sans serifs originally made as metal type in the late 1920. Neptun as used for the song titles is even older than that: it’s a revival of a turn-of-the-century oddity from AG für Schriftgießerei und Maschinenbau, a foundry in Offenbach, Germany.
Style overview of the Yankee family as shown by Alphabet Photosetting in their 1984 catalog. Yankee Shadow here is listed as Yankee Outline Shadow.
The shaded slab-serif caps chosen for the artists’ names – here misspelled Althia & Donna – were released by Letraset just a few months earlier, in 1977. Yankee Shadow was drawn by Tony Geddes. It’s one style out of a family of eight, shown by Alphabet Photosetting in London. Yankee is a collegiate slab not unlike Tal Leming’s United Serif, Christoph Koeberlin’s Winner, and Weichi He’s LL Champion. The outward-facing unilateral serifs in its boldest styles remind me of City Bold as designed by Georg Trump in 1930. Unlike City, it’s drawn entirely without curves. In this regard, it’s similar to Aldo Novarese’s Colossalis.
A sheet of 72pt Yankee Shadow for dry transfer lettering, issued in 1977 in Letraset’s Letragraphica range as LG2606. There was also a 48pt size. The Shadow style was the only one from the Yankee family to be adopted by Letraset. Scan courtesy of Letraslut.
Yankee Shadow was digitized at least twice: by Mickey Rossi as Jim Thorpe (2000) and by Nick Curtis as Sis Boom Bah NF (2007). To my knowledge, other styles from the Yankee family haven’t been revived yet.
You can read about Althea & Donna’s surprise hit on Wikipedia – and listen to it in the video below.
