I Sing the Body Electric by Ray Bradbury (Bantam)
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Make It Old and tagged with “amelia”. License: CC BY-NC-SA.
I Sing the Body Electric! is a 1969 collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. First published in 1969 by Knopf, this is the cover of Bantam’s paperback edition from 1971. The illustration is by Gene Szafran, who also provided the album art for The Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders.
6 Comments on “I Sing the Body Electric by Ray Bradbury (Bantam)”
Amelia was originally issued by VGC around 1966. The outlined and shaded variant used for the title isn’t an ad-hoc modification, but was offered as a ready-made option by Photo-Lettering. The typesetting studio in NYC also carried an open variant as well as a custom X-Bold weight.
I have a link to show you about Amelia’s adventure (as told by Luc Devroye): luc.devroye.org/amelia.html
Thanks, Jay, I’m aware of it. I can understand Stan Davis’s frustration about digitizations made without his involvement or approval. Whether all of these are really “pirated” depends on the legal terms of the competition or the designer’s contract with VGC, though, and if companies like Bitstream or Linotype acquired the rights to the design.
As often, I would take Luc Devroye’s comments with a grain of salt. How can he compare various digitizations and make judgments about which is closest to the original and at the same time state that he has “not seen the original”? One digital copy is described as a “gross deviation from the original: it has thicker strokes, and loses it completely in letters such as the K.” Now, I’m not going to defend all these early digital copies – they certainly have their flaws; design-wise, morally, and some probably also legally. However, thicker strokes could easily be explained by digitizing from a smaller size: I would hope that an Amelia optimized for 14pt has sturdier hairlines than one for 72pt! For the allegedly erring K with the heavy top arm: That’s the alternate form included in the original as shown by VGC.
I was wondering about that statement, too! If Luc has not seen the original how is he comparing the digitizations to it?
Interesting to know Stan has/had his own digital fonts, though. I’ve sent an email and hope he’s still around to answer it.
Sadly, my email was rejected by the server.
Right, I had tried the same a while ago, when I (briefly) looked into finding contact info for Davis.
I came across one memorial page for a Stanley Davis who was born in 1938 and passed away in 2020. Hope that’s not him! If anyone knows about his whereabouts, please let us know.