Barren Land Showdown by Luke Short, Fawcett Gold Medal edition
Front cover, featuring Short's name and the title set in Serendipity (condensed). Author tagline set in Volta (halbfett; Bauer, 1956); “Formerly” tagline set in News Gothic (regular; ATF, 1908). “A Fawcett Gold Medal Book” presumably set in Grotesque #9 (italic; Stephenson Blake, 1949).
Photo-Lettering’s Benguiat Serendipity (1965) in rare use – rare compared to its fruitier, more ornamented brethren – on the fourth(?) edition cover of Barren Land Showdown (Fawcett Book #R2177, first published in 1951; originally titled Barren Land Murders) by American western author Luke Short, who might have taken his pen name from the Old West gunfighter.
From the back cover:
A hard-hitting story of the Northwest, where the chill winds couldn’t cool hot tempers—where the whole Territory wasn’t big enough to hold two men…
The book is set in the Northwest Territories, meaning not Colorado; even so, it still gets by as a western.
