The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World by Harlan Ellison (Signet)
Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Nov 26th, 2023. Artwork published in
April 1974
.
Source: twitter.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Signet’s paper back edition of The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World was first published in April 1974. This printing is from 1976.
The cover combines art by Bob Pepper with a typeface by Jerry Matejka: Soul was issued by VGC around 1972. It here is used exclusively in caps from the Bold weight, and paired with ITC Avant Garde Gothic.
See also the first-edition cover design by Leo and Diane Dillon.
4 Comments on “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World by Harlan Ellison (Signet)”
Compare to Signet’s cover for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from 1971, which also features art by Bob Pepper, together with another Bauhaus-y sans:
Soul ought to be digitized.
Are there pre-digital fonts which are in limbo because someone holds the rights?
There are certainly such typefaces. I don’t know if this is the case for Soul. Maybe no one cared to do a digitization so far.
I would assume the rights to Soul lie with its designer, Jerry Matejka. I don’t have any contact info. There is a Creative Director at JCM Design in the New York City Metropolitan Area under that name, who sounds like it could be the same person. JCM Design Group, Inc. existed from 1993 to 2019 in Greenlawn, New York. There is a Jerome C. Matejka who lives in Greenlawn and was born in 1941. A designer named Jerome Matejka was with the agency Sherin & Matejka – together with Jack Sherin – which existed from 1973 to 1994.
What I’m saying is: in the time of the World Wide Web, it’s easier than ever to find such info. I’d like to encourage anyone who has plans to make a digital revival of a 20th-century typeface to get in touch with the original designer or the family.
Soul and Jerry Matejka were featured in that Industrial Art Methods magazine I wrote about on my blog a few years back.