Tom Wolfe – Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Design of the first edition Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1970.
Milton Glaser designed the dust jacket, using Bauer Bodoni as the central typeface. Milton’s own illustration frames the top half of the cover. That style of the ampersand in Bauer Bodoni as seen on the cover was available from American typesetters (see here), but is no longer available in the digital versions of the typeface. The bottom bowl of the lowercase g was likely compressed to fit the rules around the type.
The interior of the book, including the shown title page, was designed by Pat de Groot, making great use of ATF’s Caslon 471/540. Her typography uses Italic caps with Roman-style for the author’s name. Pat was an incredibly interesting person, as profiled in this obit in The Guardian.
The book consists of two essays focusings on “the conflict between black rage and white guilt”. The first essay was based on this article in New York Magazine, published earlier that year. In an interesting coincidence, in the book Wolfe refers to a 1969 party given in solidarity with a vineyard worker strike by politician Andrew Stein. Milton Glaser designed a poster for the Grape Boycott.
Title page designed by Pat de Groot.
2 Comments on “Tom Wolfe – Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Farrar Straus & Giroux”
Thank you for introducing me to Pat de Groot and her work!
The peculiar use of italic caps with roman lowercase is quite striking. That makes it easy to miss another intervention: All the roman caps in the title were scaled down. One could assume this was motivated by the desire to harmonize the typographic color – the caps in Caslon No. 540 are dark. However, de Groot did a similar thing for the cover of The Brother. The typeface used there, Volta, doesn’t suffer from dark caps, so I have to assume the designer had a preference for smaller caps.
The fancy ampersand for Bauer Bodoni was not just available from American typesetters. It belonged to the standard glyph set of the font as sold by the Bauersche Gießerei in Germany, too.
Detail from an index card by the Bauersche Gießerei. Scan courtesy of Hans Reichardt: Bleisatzschriften des 20. Jahrhunderts. Offenbach: Spatium (2008).