The Ventures – Flights Of Fantasy album art
Flights Of Fantasy is a 1968 album by The Ventures. The cover was art directed by Woody Woodward. Wayne Kimbell contributed the illustration featuring a couple travelling on a flying carpet through outer space. The band logo in Europa Grotesque with added arrows was introduced in 1966, see Wild Things!.
The typeface used for the title and the track listing is one of the many faces from the turn of the century that were rediscovered in the 1960s. It’s Edelgotisch, made in-house at Schelter & Giesecke and first cast in 1901. Chances are it was inspired by the success of Eckmann-Schrift (1900). Some sources credit the design to the painter and graphic artist Albert Knab (1870–1929 or 1870–1948). Unlike the name suggests, it’s not a gotisch (textura), but belongs to the Jugendstil branch of blackletter/roman hybrids that were summarized as neudeutsche Schriften.
In 1968, there were at least two phototype versions available; from PLINC (before 1965) and Lettergraphics (before 1968). The latter truncated the name to “Delgo”. Edelgotisch doesn’t have any italics – “Quinn The Eskimo” is simply slanted. In 2007, Tom Wallace of HiH made a digital revival of the original style plus the initials.
Detail. Edelgotisch’s blackletter share is most noticeable in the H and N with minuscule construction and the curved T. While traditional blackletter faces were rightly deemed unsuitable for all-caps settings, this was less clear-cut for the neudeutsch hybrids, see also the ad from 1904 below.
Ad by J.G. Schelter & Giesecke announcing the schmal fett style of Edelgotisch in the German trade journal Archiv für Buchgewerbe in 1904.
3 Comments on “The Ventures – Flights Of Fantasy album art”
The Schelter & Giesecke ad uses both forms of s for the lines in Edelgotiſch*, but does without the long s for the smaller text in Romanisch. This is in line with the style-specific preferences at the time, see my comment to the post about the Julius Hager ads.
*) The typesetter got one of the s’s wrong. Can you spot it?
How about that ‘ch’ ligature — is this a special addition for this specific typeface, or was it a common feature at the time of that advertisement? I have never seen it in recent typefaces (apart from elegant ‘ch’ discretionary ligatures for serif type)
At the time, ligatures for the ch and ck digraphs were commonly included in German typefaces, together with such for tz and various ones involving f and ſ (long s). In German, ch and ck represent single sounds. Having single sorts was handy for speeding up manual composition, too – apart from loanwords, the letter c rarely occurs in other combinations.
While the ligatures were mandatory in blackletter, one can find them in many roman faces, too, including sans serifs. They don’t always have such a fancy, almost symmetrical form as in Edelgotisch. In later releases like Palatino, the letters don’t touch, but are rather fitted pairs.
The use of ch/ck ligatures slowly fell out of fashion after the Second World War. This was further accelerated by the demise of metal type. You can still find tightly kerned pairs in the early digitization of Univers, though. Traditionalists might appreciate this as a language-sensitive feature, while younger designers will dismiss it as unbalanced spacing.