Opera News covers (Mar 25, 1967; Mar 22, 1969; Jan 17, 1970)

Three covers for Opera News, illustrated by Milton Glaser. The classical music magazine was art directed by Bob Ciano at the time. The magazine logo is in Gros Titre, a caps-only alphabet drawn by Swiss designer Roland Schenk in 1959 and reproduced in the second volume of Lettera (1961), edited by Armin Haab and Walter Haettenschweiler. It was probably this alphabet source book where Ciano found the letterforms. The small line below is set in all-caps Optima.

Steve Heller featured Bob Ciano’s work for Opera News in a “Daily Heller” post from 2012:

Published for members of the Metropolitan Opera Guild in New York, the magazine cost just 35 cents, but its covers were worth a million bucks. Ciano was the conductor of an ensemble of superb illustrators, including Milton Glaser, whose artworks were preludes to choruses of articles inside.

Heller’s article includes an interview with the art director and several more covers, with illustrations by Douglas Benezra, Erté, Virginia Fritz, Robert O’Hearn, Sam Kirson, Don De Mauro, Leontyne Price, and Stanisław Zagórski. The post seems to be currently unavailable on Print magazine’s website. The Internet Archive has a backup. The Opera News logo in Gros Titre was introduced in summer 1966, and remained in use until summer 1973. Previous issues had a logo in Profil, and for the 1973/1974 season, Gros Titre was replaced by Helvetica.