The Nightwalker – Atheneum book jacket

Prolific book jacket designer Lawrence Ratzkin was fond of blackletter type, as well as ITC Honda, Ronné Bonder and Tom Carnase’s 1970 “grayletter” with equal parts fraktur and roman sans serif.

Ratzkin used a couple alternates for this tight lockup, including a t that I would argue is much better than ITC Honda’s default version, and which tucks neatly into the adjacent w. The standard looped k is replaced with the alternate roman form.

Unfortunately, the current digital version of ITC Honda is missing all eight of the alternates available in the original phototype version. The sample below shows what this headline would look like in the digital font. You can see why the alt t really came in handy.