Mona by Pola Oloixarac (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Eckmannpsych doesn’t have an italic. Sure, one could slant it; the amorphous design would easily withstand some distortion. But that would be dull. What Thomas Colligan did in this jacket design is way better: combine it with another hot face of horizontal contrast. Temeraire Italienne echoes the modulation with heavy tops and bottoms, and also has the upward-pointing exit strokes found in Eckmannpsych’s M and N with their minuscule construction. What the italic omits in wobbliness, it makes up for in dynamism – typeface pairing at its best.
The Temeraire family is a sampler influenced by styles from the English lettering tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries. Eckmannpsych is a psychedelic rendition of a German Jugendstil typeface from the early 20th century. Here they join forces for something that may have 1970s vibes and yet is unmistakably 2020s.
First published in Spanish in 2019, Pola Oloixarac’s Mona was translated to English by Adam Morris and issued by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March 2021.
Picador paperback edition with added blurb, scheduled for March 2022.
