I wrote about Peter Shaffer’s fascinating play, Equus, in September last year, and in passing touched on the horse and Mari Lwyd-inspired paintings of Clive Hicks-Jenkins which seemed to complement the play’s themes of sexuality and passionate obsession. Callum James had been having similar thoughts about Clive’s art and urged his friends at The Old Stile Press to bring play and artist together. Clive was in touch last week to let me know that his illustrated edition of the play is now in print. The Old Stile Press produce limited collectors’ editions of books to the highest standard. Consequently these are expensive works but then they’re as much art pieces as books, as you can see from the care which has been lavished on this particular volume. Nice to see one of my favourite typefaces, Bodoni, used for the text.

Also in touch last week was photographer Gray Scott with news of this striking picture entitled Executionist which also happens to be a limited edition print. This is another expensive piece—as limited prints tend to be—but there’s no law that says the best things have to be cheap, is there?

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dark horses
• Gray Scott

Back in February I posted some pictures from a 1971 collection of Art Nouveau illustration and design, some of which were competition entries from The Studio magazine. The Studio, which later became the long-running Studio International, can be seen from issue 11 onwards at Archive.org now that they’ve started uploading Google’s book scans. I’ve only looked at one of these so far, Volume 11–13 which runs over 850 pages and so takes some time to go through, as do all these rather unwieldy PDF books. The issues are missing their covers and so aren’t dated but would appear to be from around 1896 to 1898, one of the final entries being a memorial piece for Aubrey Beardsley who died that year; The Studio was the magazine which had introduced Beardsley to the public only five years earlier.

The Studio ran regular competitions among its readers and the examples shown here are from some of those. I especially like these type designs; dare we assume that the “Dorian” design below is named after Dorian Gray? As a whole the magazine is an odd mix of very dull Victorian art of the landscapes and artisans type, with occasional flares of interest when they devote a feature to the emerging Art Nouveau style or profile a Symbolist artist such as Giovanni Segantini.

A note for anyone wishing to download Google scans from Archive.org: some of the PDF links lead you to a Google page where they’re trying to sell you an e-text or get you to buy a book. To see the available files you need to click “All Files: HTTP”.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Great God Pan
• Art Nouveau illustration
• Jugend Magazine

Enthusiasts of Charles Ricketts’ illustrations can find book collections of his drawings and paintings but the artist (with partner Charles Shannon) was also a printer, typographer and book designer who would no doubt have preferred his illustrations to be seen in their intended setting. Archive.org has a few choices examples of Rickett’s books, of which the most profusely illustrated is Hero and Leander (1894), Christopher Marlowe’s poem (completed by George Chapman).

Also of interest is Danaë (1903) by Thomas Sturge Moore with its black and red type, A Bibliography of the Books Issued by Hacon & Ricketts (1904), and A Defence of the Revival of Printing (1899). The latter is of interest to book designers and typographers for its presentation of Ricketts’ aesthetic philosophy. Ricketts’ and Shannon’s books made continual use of a small leaf motif as a pilcrow to mark a fresh paragraph. In A Defence of the Revival of Printing Ricketts discusses his replacement for the ampersand (&), which he disliked, preferring instead a new character combining the letters E and T, ampersands being a contraction of the Latin word “et”. There’s also some discussion of his unique type designs which he charmingly refers to as “founts”, preferring, like contemporary William Morris, the antique terminology.

Colophon from Hero and Leander. A rose forms the monogram of Ricketts’ and Shannon’s Vale Press.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Art Nouveau illustration
• Dorian Gray revisited

My third CD design for the Tectonic label is another piece of relative minimalism which once again features photos by Liz Eve. All the backgrounds on this occasion are microscope close-ups of vinyl records, very fitting for a double-CD collection of recent 12″ releases.

The Tectonic logo (which predates my involvement with the label) is based on the Technics logo and for this release I tidied the label logo slightly, a process which led to the discovery that the Technics design used a variant of the Clarendon typeface for its letter shapes (it’s not an exact match). This in turn led me to use Clarendon in various weights across the packaging, something which made a change from the usual sans serif or monospace font. The great Saul Bass frequently used Clarendon for his title sequences; if it’s good enough for Saul, it’s certainly good enough for me.

Tectonic main man Rob Ellis talked to Fact magazine about the new release earlier this week.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Aerial by 2562
• New things for November

The first of the books I’ve been designing for Tachyon Publications appears this month. Two more are due to follow and I’m working on another at the moment; more about those titles later.

The Best of Michael Moorcock was a pleasure to be involved with not only because I’ve been reading Moorcock’s fiction for a very long time but I’ve also been fortunate during that time to get to know the writer and Linda Moorcock, his wife. Mike likes the work I’ve done in the past for Savoy Books and we did have an anthology of his favourite pieces by other writers planned for Constable & Robinson back in 2005. That book didn’t work out so this makes up for its cancellation. This is an excellent anthology, put together initially as a private enterprise by editor John Davey who managed the difficult task of compiling a collection which ranges over forty years of writing. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer came aboard as co-editors for the Tachyon edition.

I’ve been working mainly on the interior design of the Tachyon volumes (although I’ve also done the cover for Jeff VanderMeer’s forthcoming Booklife) and for this title I took a cue from Ann Morn’s cover design which features a pair of gates emblazoned with large letter Ms. The title spread above takes the letter M from the typeface used for the author’s name and multiplies that to create an equivalent set of gates for the reader to pass through. I try to play down the pyrotechnics for fiction—the words are the important thing, not the graphic design—but since this was a story collection I thought I’d try illustrating each piece using the title typography alone. Most of these are done by using a suitable typeface but for a few pieces I managed to create an arrangement that reflected the story. Behold the Man (below) is the Nebula Award-winning story of a journey back in time to find the historical Jesus. The cross shape not only relates to the Biblical theme but also implies the crossed time streams and Moorcock’s layered, cross-cut narrative.

The Best of Michael Moorcock is available now from the usual sources and received a glowing review in the Guardian. Later this month, and other work permitting, I’m hoping to make a start on what will effectively be a companion volume, Savoy’s long-delayed Into the Media Web, another collection by John Davey which this time collects the best of Moorcock’s copious essays, reviews and other non-fiction.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Designing Booklife
• The Sonic Assassins
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others
• An announcement redux

Or Gramato-graphices. In quo varia scripturae emblemata, belgicis, germanicis, italicis, hispanicis, gallicis characteribus exaata… scripta, aeri incisa, et impressa per Cornelium Boissenium Enchusanum to give the full title. A treatise on penmanship and calligraphy from 1605 by Cornelis Dirckszoon Boissens. Also another free PDF at Archive.org. Searching for better reproductions turned up this stunning engraving by Boissens in the Rijksmuseum collection.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems
• Letters and Lettering
• Studies in Pen Art
• Flourishes

Continuing an occasional series.

The poster at the top left is the unused Ministry of Information design created to maintain Britain’s resolve after war had been declared in September 1939. This simple slogan struck a chord recently among Britons sick of the climate of fear, security theatre and authoritarian coercion which, deliberately or not, appears to benefit politicians and the agents of the State more than the populace who pay their wages. The BBC asked whether this was the greatest motivational poster ever. The Guardian noted the popularity of the slogan and its inevitable commercial exploitation:

…one day in 2000, Stuart Manley, co-owner with his wife Mary of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, was sifting through a box of hardbacks he had bought at auction when he saw “A big piece of paper folded up at the bottom. I opened it out, and I thought, wow. That’s quite something. I showed it to Mary, and she agreed. So we framed it and put it up on the bookshop wall. And that’s where it all started.”

The reworked version at the top right is one of the opening pages from The Black Dossier (2007) by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. The crown is replaced by a portcullis and Gill Sans is dropped in favour of Edward Johnston’s sans serif typeface which has been used throughout the London Underground system since the 1930s.

The original poster has been undergoing numerous redesigns, from the jokey to the serious. The green design is one of the better variants by designer Matt Jones.

The blue design is part of an advertising campaign by the British Home Office intended to promote their new “Policing Pledge”, “a set of promises to local residents that not only gives more information about who their local neighbourhood policing team is, but also ensures that communities will have a stronger voice in telling the police what they think is most important and what they are most worried about.”

Laudable as this intention may be, I was very surprised when I saw this poster on a bus shelter earlier in the week. While the Home Office and its advertising people are fully entitled to reclaim a design which originated with the State in the first place, one of the reasons the original poster strikes a chord is because it runs counter to anti-terrorist nonsense like this. It speaks, among other things, to people sick of being lied to by politicians and spied on by police and security services. To see a forgotten design experience a swelling of grassroots popularity then be co-opted by the State itself is as depressing as it would have been had Richard Nixon used psychedelic posters to campaign for his re-election. To see a campaign use slogans which treat the rights of defendants as flippantly as the poster remixers when this present government has spent the past ten years undermining the rights of its citizens is simply a disgrace.

Update: A Flickr pool catalogues the variations.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #7: eyes and triangles
• Design as virus #6: Cassandre
• Design as virus #5: Gideon Glaser
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders

A post for Ada Lovelace Day, “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.”

Susan Kare was, and still is, a graphic designer specialising in user interface graphics. Facebook users may recognise her gift icons but her earlier work is even more familiar to Macintosh users since it was her job at Apple in 1983 to design the icons for the first Macintosh interface. Many of the original black & white images have been phased out or replaced by higher-resolution equivalents but some still remain, in particular the pointing hand, the stopwatch (which became an hourglass in Windows) and the Command symbol which was based on a map icon for Swedish camping grounds. She also designed some of the fonts used by the first Mac OS including Geneva—still a web standard—and Chicago which was the primary Mac font for many years. In a field overly-dominated by men, her work lies at the heart of technology we’re using today, right down to the Mac keyboard on which I type these words.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Folder icons

“Lenin is dead but the Russian Communist Party lives on” (no date).

More typography and yet more Soviet poster art which seems perennially popular with graphic designers. Bold Constructivist designs like this example are part of the reason why: over 80 years old yet still striking. Type foundry P22 have a set of Constructivist fonts similar to the typeface used here. Poster tip via Coudal.

Sieg Heil Iconographers, title spread (2006).

I plundered the Soviet style in 2006 for the design of Jon Farmer’s Sieg Heil Iconographers for Savoy Books. The typeface this time was Jonathan Barnbrook’s contemporary design, Newspeak. Does the assertive bad taste of the book’s title undermine the Communist propaganda or do the Agitprop graphics ironically counterpoint the discussion of fascist history within? That’s left for the reader to decide.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lenin Rising
• Dead Monuments
• Soviet ceramics of the 1920s
• Enormous structures II: Tatlin’s Tower

Marvellous. Typefaces sorted by popularity according to surveys. Interesting for this Bodoni fan finding Bodoni as the first serif at no. 3. Some surprises too—is Univers really that popular?

Created by Squidspot. See the whole thing here. Via Metafilter.

Autobahn by Kraftwerk; Vertigo #6360 620.

Colin Buttimer was in touch last week to let me know he’d copied my Barney Bubbles post (with my permission) to his excellent new site, Hard Format, which is devoted to the art of music design. In the intro to that piece he repeats something he’d mentioned to me earlier, namely his belief that Barney Bubbles designed the UK release of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn album in 1974. I thought this unlikely at first but the more I’ve been thinking about it the more possible it seems. So here’s a quick run through the evidence in the hope that someone out there may have more information to either confirm or deny the theory.

The 2004 version from the unreleased The Catalogue.

Firstly it should be noted that the original German sleeve was a painting by the group’s regular designer, Emil Schult, who also helped write the title track. Schult’s painting/collage seems at odds with the group’s later rigorous aesthetic and it’s surprising that the design has persisted alongside the UK design. Something which complicates the theory here is that the German painting and cover design exist in several variations, with a car dashboard visible in the early pressings and—crucially—the German autobahn symbol (similar to the UK motorway symbol on the UK release) superimposed on the painting. I have one of the later vinyl reissues with Schult’s painting on the cover and the motorway bridge printed on both sides of the inner sleeve. But someone in the UK still made the decision to make the appropriated road sign the focus of the design for its first UK outing. The previous Kraftwerk album, the wonderful Ralf & Florian, also has at least two different cover designs while their first two albums—featuring their distinctive traffic cone trademark—were repackaged as a double set by Vertigo in 1972. That design takes their stencil lettering and applies it to an oscilloscope wave. Like the Vertigo Autobahn sleeve the design is uncredited, as were a number of other Vertigo releases.

Kraftwerk on stage in 2005.

So where does Barney Bubbles fit in?

1) He was one of a number of designers working for Vertigo in the early Seventies. Marcus Keef produced many of the covers for the folky/prog side of things while Hipgnosis and Roger Dean were among the other talents given an early start by the label. There are two covers credited to BB under his Teenburger name, the first album by Cressida in 1970 and, more significantly, Gracious! by Gracious, also 1970. The stark simplicity of the latter’s giant italic exclamation mark runs counter to anything else on the label at that time.

2) The Gracious! design is printed on bubble-textured card while the white areas of the Autobahn design are embossed onto the sleeve. Texturing isn’t unique to the Gracious album, however, so this factor is circumstantial. Vertigo’s designers used a number of elaborate effects from die-cut sleeves to packaging which opened out to a much larger size, a trick BB famously used later for his Space Ritual and Armed Forces sleeves. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality album was designed by the Bloomsbury Group and that cover uses a similar embossing.

3) The typography. This is probably the clincher for me. The title design for Autobahn is a very odd variant of a Herbert Beyer Bauhaus-style typeface although ITC didn’t produce their Bauhaus face until 1975. It isn’t the earlier Beyer-derived Blippo either, several of the characters are different shapes and several have also been extended slightly. The Bauhaus reference is a clue for me simply because it fits with Barney’s knowledge of design history and also his sense of humour—Germans! The type layout on the back of the sleeve is even more telling. Typography is often like a signature and BB was very sharp with his use of type; he was also very fond of using Futura and the album credits are indeed set in Futura (another German type design incidentally). After this release Futura became the default Kraftwerk typeface until they began using computer-styled designs. You want more? It’s difficult to tell from a low-res jpeg but the word Gracious! on his earlier sleeve looks to me like it was set in the bold condensed oblique weight of Futura.

The Autobahn titles as reproduced on the UK cassette release.

ITC Bauhaus Heavy designed by Edward Benguiat and Victor Caruso (1975).

Why does this matter? For a start there’s still more of Barney Bubbles’ work to be brought to light, so this can be considered one part of an ongoing investigation. It’s an important piece of graphic design which nonetheless remains uncredited. Peter Saville has frequently mentioned this sleeve design as a formative influence. In #231 of The Wire magazine he said:

Not only did the music have a profound influence on me, the sleeve made a lasting impression—the appropriated road sign symbolising the excitement and romance of travelling through Europe. It was my introduction to semiotics, and inspired a use of visual codes that I would develop later through Factory Records.

The person who introduced Saville to Autobahn was designer Malcolm Garrett who later worked with Barney Bubbles. Both Garrett and Saville acknowledged the importance of Barney’s work in Paul Gorman’s recent book, Reasons to be Cheerful. Saville was later designing sleeves for OMD whose music owes a huge debt to Kraftwerk. It would be surprising if all these disparate threads could be traced back to a single design source.

As always, if anyone has any further information please leave a comment.

• Vertigoswirl.com | A very thorough guide to all the original Vertigo releases.

Update: added the 2004 CD version.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Old music and old technology
• A Clockwork Orange: The Complete Original Score
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer

Or Fables and other short poems : collected from the most celebrated English authors : the whole curiously engrav’d for the practice & amusement of young gentlemen & ladies in the art of writing to give its full title, a children’s primer from 1731 and another free title available at Archive.org. John Bickham was one of the famous family of engravers among whom George the Elder is particularly celebrated for his own stunning penmanship in The Universal Penman (1740), a book which is still in print. The moral fables here are mostly single-page verse pieces with titles such as The Lady and the Wasp or The Spaniel and the Camelion. One short piece, On Liberty, is especially pertinent following the weekend when the Convention on Modern Liberty declared its mission to resist the rise of the Total Surveillance State.

Oh Liberty! thou Goddess heav’nly bright,
Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight;
Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign,
And smiling Plenty leads thy wanton train.
Eas’d of her Load, Subjection grows more light,
And Poverty looks chearful in thy Sight.
Thou mak’st the gloomy face of Nature gay,
Giv’st Beauty to the Sun, and pleasure to the Day.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Letters and Lettering
• Studies in Pen Art
• Flourishes

I created a cover design recently for Jeff VanderMeer’s new novel, Finch, and shortly after completing that Jeff asked if I could put together some cover ideas for his forthcoming writer’s guide, Booklife, which Tachyon will be publishing later this year. Jeff is known as a fantasy writer but this book was intended to have a general appeal for any would-be or working writer. It also needed to look suitably contemporary and (possibly) reflect the discussion within which concerns the modern writer’s use of computers, the internet and social networks. Lastly, several lines of text needed to be placed on the cover without it looking confused or messy.

I agreed to this whilst busy with several other projects so the initial drafts were rather haphazard. (That’s my excuse, anyway.) The first version (above) came out of an idea to apply a kind of trompe l’oeil effect to the cover with a torn dustjacket and handwritten amendments. The red call-out/roundel highlights an important sub-section of the book. This was knocked up very quickly and, as well as not looking very contemporary, the title doesn’t look enough like gold blocking to be convincing. Jeff requested something more up-to-date.

Version 2 was a hasty attempt to get contemporary although this looks too bland and sterile, like a business primer or a university press book. We’d talked about trying to convey the nature of electronic networks without resorting to the internet clichés of the Nineties, hence the connected books in the background. I was thinking of the kind of clear-line illustration you get in some European comics but this turned out to be one of those ideas which seem good in the abstract yet trying to get it to work turns out to be a) difficult and b) not such a good idea after all. The background quickly became crowded and confused when trying to convey any kind of depth. This cover has the first appearance of one of my sunbursts, a habitual motif I’m guilty of using in places where it doesn’t always belong. I blame a Catholic upbringing which left me with a halo obsession.

Jeff wasn’t keen on this either so he suggested I go back to the first version but show an old Victorian book design ripped away to reveal something contemporary underneath. He mentioned William Morris designs but I didn’t think they would be suitable; Morris’s books have beautiful elaborate borders but their layout follows the medieval page grid which is asymmetrical. I wanted something equally elaborate but with suitable symmetry.

A bit of web searching turned up this Jean Lorrain cover by Léon Rudnicki which I have in a book of art nouveau design but at a size too small to be usable. It took a fair amount of work to refashion a medium-res jpeg into the vector version below.

Some additional work in Photoshop and we had something which looked like an old cover blocked in gold.

Which was then ripped away to reveal a new version of the earlier bland cover. A globe has been introduced as a new feature although I warned about globes being too closely associated with travel books.

An unfinished draft. Jeff suggested changing the green cover to blue and he wasn’t keen on the diagonal tear so this was made horizontal. By this point I’d decided to get rid of the networked books and replace them with symbols that convey the digital world. Ideally you’d want to spend some time creating symbols like this yourself but I still had too many other things on the go so these are taken from a Linotype set of office dingbats. Some of these are now distinctly dated, there’s a floppy disc (which I didn’t use) and the computer monitor has a curved edge to the screen like an old TV. The sunburst is still hanging in there but has turned blue. In design terms blue often signifies the future (in a cold electronic sense) in the same way that sepia signifies the past.

Another unfinished draft which attempted to combine the symbols with the globe. Jeff liked this but I didn’t, I felt that attempting to combine two very different covers had led us astray. Jeff was still eager to convey a sense of modernity or even the future and I thought this would be difficult. In the 1990s there was a well-defined sense of futurity attached to anything cybernetic or computer-oriented. That idea and its attendant imagery is now thoroughly outmoded, computer technology is so embedded in our lives that we barely notice it. Our phones are as powerful as home computers were a decade ago. In graphic design terms there’s currently no shorthand (apart from vague blue tones) that says “the future”, not least because people aren’t sure what the future will be or if there’ll be one that anyone actually wants to live in.

So the torn book was scrapped but I kept the globe and some of the office symbols. The roundel still persists. I picked out a distinctive typeface for the title although if we’d have gone with this as the final cover I would have removed the filler elements from the O and the D.

Jeff thought this was okay but asked to see the globe brought back so here it is along with the returning sunburst.

I think this was the one which Jeff liked most of all but I didn’t although the colours at least blend together. I felt we were still at the cold business end of things and suggested scrapping all of these approaches and trying something new.

Which is what I did. Jeff had earlier suggested growing roots although I couldn’t see how that could be easily reconciled with the digital networks aspect. USB cables as roots? Hmm… Whilst pondering this one of those flashes of inspiration occurred which I immediately sketched and emailed. I knew this would look good if it was done as a very clean vector layout—a cross-section of earth with the title putting out roots and books blooming from a plant stem. Jeff liked it so I set to work.

First thing to do was to get the title right which involved printing out the type at large size then drawing the roots with a pencil.

Next I needed a suitably stylised plant and came across this very tiny motif in one of my design source books. This was from an art nouveau border design so a trace element of older book styles would still be present. All that was required now was to put the various elements together.

And here’s the result which finally pleased everyone. Slightly different to the sketch since I decided to borrow a trick from designer Barney Bubbles and make the book flowers and the title lettering form a face which gives an additional, subliminal quality to the title. I managed to get the sunburst in there with some justification at last—it adds depth and colour as well as being…the sun—and there was enough space for a quote at the top. All the type ended up as different weights of Helvetica. Watching the Brian Eno documentary last night I was struck by his comment that instruments today give you a vast array of sounds when all you really need are a handful of very good ones. The same applies to typefaces. I love typography, and enjoy seeing new designs appear, but despite the thousands of available typefaces you often come back to a small selection which do the job better than anything else. Helvetica is one of these.

This cover is a good example of how much the design process is about narrowing your range of options. Some of the blind alleys would have been avoided if we’d discussed ideas at length beforehand but we were both very busy and some of the intermediate stages only came together after playing around in Illustrator. This isn’t the first time I’ve had the flash of inspiration occur way down the line, sometimes all you can do is thrash around waiting for lightning to strike. I’m happy to say it usually strikes for me a lot earlier than this but as long as it keeps striking I don’t mind. As always, reaching the destination is the important thing, not how you get there.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Finch
• Steampunk Horror Shortcuts
• A cover for Mr. VanderMeer
• Pasticheur’s Addiction
• Fungal observations
• Shriek: The Movie
• Jeff on Bldgblog
• An announcement redux
• City of Saints and Madmen

So then… The above is the better of my two entries for a Valentine’s day competition on the Extensis blog which required you to create a besotted ode to a typeface. The wonderful Gotham sans serif by Hoefler & Frere-Jones was used by the Obama campaign during the recent Presidential election, as I noted back in November. I didn’t win but they did give me an honourable mention which was a surprise. Some very witty and clever entries but it helps if you’re a typography geek to appreciate many of the jokes.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The best font won

Given this week’s conjunction of a Poe anniversary and the Presidential Inauguration, creating this was irresistible. Obamicon.me allows you to turn any photo into something resembling Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous Obama poster. The only drawbacks are the way the processing stretches the type and the use of Arial for the title, a font which few self-respecting designers can bear to use. If you’re as picky as I am, some Photoshop post-production is required.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The best font won
• Another lazy meme post

top left: Leo & Diane Dillon (1969); top right: Tom Huffman (1968).
bottom left: Gray Morrow & Henry Berkowitz (1967); bottom right: no credit.

Great examples of typically florid Sixties’ cover design at Font of all Wisdom – Unique lettering in design, a Flickr pool. The masterful Leo & Diane Dillon illustrated many of Harlan Ellison’s books, inside and out.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth

Pages from Letters and Lettering (1902), “A Treatise with 200 Examples” by Frank Chouteau Brown. A free PDF book at Archive.org.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Studies in Pen Art

The beautifully elegant Gotham typeface by Hoefler & Frere-Jones was already becoming pretty ubiquitous even before the Obama brand designers chose it for all their campaign graphics. I’ve used it myself a couple of times recently, notably on the jacket for Keith Seward’s Horror Panegyric. Some typefaces have a flush of popularity then fade as they start to look dated. I can’t see this happening with Gotham; Hoefler & Frere-Jones have pulled off the very difficult task of creating a new sans serif which not only works as well as classics such as Futura and Gill Sans but is on the way to being a classic in its own right.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• New things for December

Two of many stunning calligraphy samples from Studies in Pen Art (1914) by William E Dennis, a free PDF at Luc Devroye’s extensive font site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Flourishes

The Tugra, or imperial monogram, of Suleiman the Magnificent, c. 1550–65. From the calligraphy section of the Islamic art collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ottoman calligraphy and Arabic typography
• Flourishes
• Ghubar
• Calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaárani
• The Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy
• Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East

New York magazine, April 8, 1968. Design by Milton Glaser.

Part of an occasional series.

It’s probably only coincidence that the sleeve of the second High Llamas album resembles the cover of the first (?) issue of New York magazine. But many of the other High Llamas albums feature design elements borrowed from the Sixties and Seventies and the music on this one owes much to American music of the period, notably Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys.

New York magazine celebrated its fortieth anniversary this year. I tried my hand a couple of years ago at designing the magazine’s High Priority graphic for an online competition. I didn’t win but I did make the runners-up list (along with 120 others).

Gideon Gaye by The High Llamas (1994). Art by Kevin Hopper, design by André & Brown, Tony Lyons.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Design as virus #4: Metamorphoses
• Design as virus #3: the sincerest form of flattery
• Design as virus #2: album covers
• Design as virus #1: Victorian borders
• High Priorities 2
• High Priorities

Above: Ottoman calligraphy from a selection at the Library of Congress. Below: contemporary Arabic typography from the Experimental Typography Flickr pool.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ghubar
• Calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaárani
• The Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy
• Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East

Penguin is really coming up with the goods these days, living up to their reputation as a house with high standards of cover design, unlike Picador and the shabby way they treated Cormac McCarthy recently.

Ian Fleming’s Bond novels are the latest to receive a makeover with some fabulous art from illustrator Michael Gillette. 2008 is Fleming’s centenary so the books have been republished as demi-format hardbacks with these new designs adorning the jackets. Each cover features a different girl matched to the theme of the book (yes, I know they’re women but in Bond’s world women are always girls unless they’re Miss Moneypenny); each cover also features groovy period type which alludes to the hand-drawn elaborations of the Sixties and Seventies. The effect is reminiscent of the poster art for the 1967 film of Casino Royale (below) which used a naked girl as the focal point; all Bond posters before and after this place oo7 himself centre stage. Penguin even dare to push the level of pastiche by making On Her Majesty’s Secret Service look rather like an old romance novel, not such a surprising decision since this is the book where Bond gets married.

My favourite Bond covers remain the old Pan paperbacks from 1963 but that’s just me; these look great. There’s been a persistent moan recently from authors and publishers worrying about file sharing as they foresee the publishing world going the same way as the music business. The solution is obvious: you can’t stop texts being copied and distributed but you can make the books themselves desirable objects so make them worth buying and owning. Penguin has numbered the spines of the new Bond books as they did with their recent Sherlock Holmes reprints, a smart appeal to book collectors as well as a tip to read them in the order they were written. “Smart” is the key word here; Picador take note.

Update: The Pan covers mentioned above were designed by Richard Hawkey. Bond site MI6.co.uk has some details about the designer.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Repackaging Cormac
• The World’s Greatest Detective
• James Bond postage stamps
• Boys Own Books

There’s calligraphy and then there’s fraktur extravaganzas such as this….

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Post one thousand
• Ghubar
• Calligraphy by Mouneer Al-Shaárani
• The Journal of Ottoman Calligraphy
• Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East

left: Vintage International (US), cover design by Susan Mitchell (1993).
right: Picador (UK) reprint (2008).

After the Oscars success of No Country for Old Men it’s understandable that Cormac McCarthy’s publishers would want to reprint all his works. His books still appear under the Picador imprint in the UK and they’ve been reissued recently in uniform editions with new cover designs. A couple of these are an improvement on their lacklustre predecessors, and they don’t look so bad when seen together on a shelf, but on the whole this McCarthy fan is disappointed by the overall blandness they present.

My earlier post about McCarthy’s UK covers was critical of the The Road which used a combination of a stock photo and Akzidenz-Grotesk Condensed for the typography. In the case of No Country for Old Men the photo from the American original by Chip Kidd was used but his carefully-judged type layout was dropped. Unfortunately it’s The Road approach which has been continued on the new covers with variable degrees of success. The Chip Kidd designs that Picador repeated in the 1990s made similar use of suggestive photos but there was at least some attempt made to match form to content; a number of the new designs are vague in the extreme. I assume that the disparate group of objects on the cover of Blood Meridian relate to the character of the Judge when he reveals his intention to catalogue every new object that he comes across. But that’s an incidental detail in one scene of a baroque, ferocious and very violent historical novel. So the image isn’t exactly a misrepresentation but it puts the wrong emphasis on a book that could easily be described as a Western nightmare. And they’ve also dropped the book’s subtitle, an amendment I find especially egregious.

Even more bland is the picture of a shack on the cover of Child of God, McCarthy’s tale of a backwoods psychopath who moves into a cave and murders women so he can have sex with their corpses. Anyone buying the Picador book on the strength of the cover is in for a surprise. And since when did that novel have a definite article in its title? Best of the bunch is probably The Crossing (above) which shows the wolf that provides the impetus for the story. The type works better on this cover and the animal’s reflection in the water is a nice touch since it can be read as relating to the various symmetries and reflections in The Border Trilogy, of which this book forms the second part.

Picador set a high standard for paperback design in the Seventies which makes the sight of uninspired and lazy work doubly-dismaying. Susan Mitchell’s covers for the Vintage paperbacks are still the best I’ve seen for McCarthy’s books—and they’re still available—but if these new editions pick up new readers on the strength of the author’s moment in the limelight then that’s no bad thing. It’s the words that count, after all.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cormac McCarthy book covers

Or the thousandth post, so here’s a capital M from the Gothic alphabet of Marie de Bourgogne, circa 1480. Taken from Fantastic Alphabets (L’Aventurine, Paris, 1995).

top left: Bob Pepper (1969); right: David Johnston (1974).
bottom left: Mati Klarwein (1972); right: Gervasio Gallardo (1972).

I wrote about the classic line of fantasy paperbacks in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series last year as part of the post about Bob Pepper’s illustration:

It was the success of the publication of The Lord of the Rings in America which inspired Betty Ballantine to publish a line of fantasy classics in the late Sixties. The series began its run in 1969 and continued until 1974. Lin Carter was commissioned as editor and given free reign to choose any title he thought might be suitable with the result that many of the books in the series—obscurities such as Lud-in-the-mist by Hope Mirrlees—received their first paperback publication. Carter also reprinted personal favourites which frequently shifted from fantasy to outright horror, such as the titles from HP Lovecraft and William Hope Hodgson. The range and scope of this line is what makes the series so notable today and the books have become highly-collectable as a result.

I’m fairly sure this page of cover scans of the BAF series wasn’t there when I was searching for Pepper covers. Whether it was or not, it contains a lot of Bob Pepper artwork I hadn’t seen before at large size, plus a substantial number of the other covers. I was never all that taken with Gervasio Gallardo’s work which took the lion’s share of the illustration duties but the passage of time has lent his paintings and their florid title designs the distinction of being emblematic of the era. And some of the rest are still pretty decent covers.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Bob Pepper
• Fantastic art from Pan Books

Coralie at Penguin Books sent through these cover designs today, a splendid “collect the set” republication of the Sherlock Holmes stories which should be on the shelves early next month. This follows last year’s collection of similarly repackaged Edwardian thrillers which included Conan Doyle’s dinosaur tale, The Lost World. Having recently watched the Granada TV adaptations of the Holmes stories now would be a good time to go back to the books, especially since I only recall ever having read The Sign of Four and a couple of the stories.

And on the technical side, I’ll note that my typeface mania identifies the font used for the titles of these books as Gable Antique Condensed, a contemporary design by Jim Spiece based on a Bauer typeface from around 1900. Unless it’s one of the variants mentioned by Identifont….

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• “The game is afoot!”
• Boys Own Books

I spent much of the summer of 1983 playing games on a very primitive ZX Spectrum computer while listening to the first couple of Street Sounds Electro compilations. Those mix albums were among the best releases that year and remain highly sought after, seeing as they’ve never been reissued on CD.

The musical reputation of the compilations has overshadowed the sleeve design which was very distinctive for the time and undoubtedly a factor in their success. The vertical ELECTRO type was inspired by Neville Brody’s design for The Face which had turned the magazine’s title through ninety degrees the year before. Also very Brodyish was the use of photocopier-processed graphics and narrow typography although it should be pointed out that Brody hand-drew nearly all his headlines which left his imitators searching through type catalogues for approximations. The sleeve designs are credited to “Red Ranch for Carver’s” about whom I can find no information whatever. Things came full-circle when The Face ran a feature on the electro scene in 1984 giving Brody the opportunity to do a cover with his own variant on the sleeve layouts.

Essential Electro 9-album box, HBOX 1 (1984).

One of the big attractions of these albums for me was the new directions they were opening up for electronic music. Outside the mainstream pop world electronica in the early Eighties meant either the polite fare of Tangerine Dream or the dreary sludge of minor industrial acts such as Portion Control. Cabaret Voltaire were still vital for a while and their thundering Crackdown single (with sleeve design by Neville Brody) was remixed for its 12-inch incarnation by electro producer John Robie. But nothing matched the excitement of a bunch of NYC kids lifting Kraftwerk riffs and playing in a very unselfconscious manner with new and relatively cheap equipment, especially the Roland TR-808 drum machine which provides the backbone for many of these recordings.

Crucial Electro, ELCST 999 (1984).

A1 Tyrone Brunson—The Smurf
A2 Warp 9—Light Years Away
A3 Warp 9—Nunk (New Wave Funk)
A4 Man Parrish—Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop)
A5 Herbie Hancock—Rockit
B1 Twilight 22—Electric Kingdom
B2 Cybotron—Clear
B3 Hashim—Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)
B4 Captain Rock—Return Of Captain Rock
B5 Time Zone—Wild Style

Although this came later in the series it’s probably the best single collection. Lots of classic tracks with John “Jellybean” Benitez’s Warp 9, Man Parrish, 43 year-old Herbie Hancock (assisted by Bill Laswell and DST) showing he could still rock with the kids, Cybotron aka Juan Atkins riffing on Kraftwerk, Hashim’s great Al-Naafiysh (one of my all-time favourites) and Afrika Bambaataa’s Time Zone. Crucial indeed.

Electro 1, ELCST 01 (1983).

A1 The Packman—I’m The Packman (Eat Everything I Can)
A2 Newcleus—Jam On Revenge (The Wikki-Wikki Song)
A3 West Street Mob—Break Dancin’—Electric Boogie
A4 C-Bank—Get Wet
B1 K-9 Corp—Dog Talk
B2 G. Force—Feel The Force
B3 Project Future—Ray-Gun-Omics
B4 Captain Rock—Return Of Captain Rock

“As seen on TV”, Electro 1 was dominated by breaks and raps and which means it sounds more conventionally hip hop than some of its neighbours. The Newcleus track was a real gem, however, a very infectious chipmunk-voiced rap whose Wikki-Wikki subtitle refers to the sound of record scratching, still a big deal in 1983.

Electro 2, ELCST 02 (1983).

A1 The B-Boys—Two, Three, Break
A2 The B-Boys—Cuttin’ Herbie
A3 Xena—On The Upside
A4 Hashim—Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)
B1 Rammellzee Vs K-Rob—Beat Bop
B2 Two Sisters—B-Boys Beware (Club Mix)
B3 Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel—White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)

Along with Crucial Electro, the other high point of the series. This starts out in a very minimal manner with two tracks of simple break stuff (Cuttin’ Herbie is a scratch mix of Rockit) then explodes into colour with Xena’s anthem and Hashim’s Al-Naafiysh. Beat Bop is a slow Message-style rap which undergoes another explosion as Two Sisters burst into a tremendous girl-power rap. Al-Naafiysh remains for me the definitive TR-808 track but B-Boys Beware gives it a run for its money.

Electro 3, ELCST 03 (1984).

A1 Divine Sounds—Dollar Bill
A2 Imperial Brothers—We Come To Rock
A3 Newcleus—Jam On It
B1 Boogie Boys—Zodiac
B2 Pumpkin—King Of The Beat
B3 Davy DMX—One For The Treble (Fresh)
B4 Fresh 3—MC’s Fresh

This for me was the last good collection (although side two was rather weak) including the welcome return of Newcleus. The series continued up to #10 in 1985 but #4 lacked the magic of the earlier editions and the expediency of limited resources moved my attention elsewhere. Much of electro’s original momentum was lost by the mid-Eighties as the rap quotient gradually went mainstream and artists outside the scene such as New Order began co-opting the producers. Some artists stayed with the underground, however, Juan Atkins in particular moving electro forward into Detroit Techno. It’s (very) arguable that much of the music you’ve been hearing over the past twenty years can be traced back to these few singles. And if you want some equally spurious contemporary relevance, Xeni Jardin insists that Newcleus’s “wikki-wikki” refrain is the Wikipedia theme tune.

Nearly everything here has been reissued on compilation CDs although those collections lack the juxtaposition you get from the Street Sounds mixes. Try to hear the original vinyl if you can.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Bob Pepper
• Oh Yeah by Charles Mingus
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records