Of Course You Can Sew! – Basics of Sewing for the Young Beginner by Barbara Corrigan (Doubleday, 1971)
Of Course You Can Sew! – Basics of Sewing for the Young Beginner (front cover).
This use of Davison Arabesque – an unusual case of the typeface being used in both upper- and lowercase characters – for the title on the front cover of Of Course You Can Sew! – Basics of Sewing for the Young Beginner by Barbara Corrigan, published by Doubleday (now Knopf Doubleday) in 1971, comes courtesy of my following the blog “The Vintage Traveler”, authored by Lizzie Bramlett, specifically this post, dating from 18th April 2021.
I am unfortunately only able to upload six images, so to view the missing three Fonts In Use readers will have to head over to the “The Vintage Traveler”. However, the six I have manged to upload will serve to illustrate the other fonts I believe to be featured here.
In addition to Davison Arabesque, the other typeface appearing on the front cover appears to be Futura, in regular and italic form. Turning our attention to the contents of the book, the typeface used for the titles at the top of the pages, the page numbers and the body text are set in Caledonia and the figure numbers and pattern measurements and guides in News Gothic.
As well as writing the book, Barbara Corrigan provided the illustrations, which are highly evocative of the young fashions of the early 1970s and to see a few more details of her life and work these are to be found at the aforementioned “The Vintage Traveler” blog post.
Of Course You Can Sew! – Basics of Sewing for the Young Beginner (page 67, fig. 9).
Of Course You Can Sew! – Basics of Sewing for the Young Beginner (page unknown, figs. 16 & 17).
Of Course You Can Sew! – Basics of Sewing for the Young Beginner (page 80, figs. 20, 21 & 22).
Of Course You Can Sew! – Basics of Sewing for the Young Beginner (page unknown, figs. 13, 14 & 15).
Of Course You Can Sew! – Basics of Sewing for the Young Beginner (page unknown, figs. 1 & 2).
2 Comments on “Of Course You Can Sew! – Basics of Sewing for the Young Beginner by Barbara Corrigan (Doubleday, 1971)”
I believe this is the first time I’ve seen Davison Arabesque used with lowercase outside specimens – nice find!
A digitized copy of the entire book is available from the Internet Archive. The back flap has the credit for the jacket design: It’s the work of Wendell Minor.
Thanks, Florian!
I’ve just written an email, with the news that this first-of-its-kind entry has gone live, to Lizzie Bramlett. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled!