Gas Equipment Manufacturers ad (1967)
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Bart Solenthaler and tagged with “plantin” and “futura”. License: All Rights Reserved.
All the Kelly kids had nice hot baths.
All the Holden kids had was a nice long wait.
How come?
Gas makes the big difference.
This magazine ad from 1967 was jointly sponsored by various gas equipment manufacturers in the U.S., in cooperation with the American Gas Association, Inc. The display typeface appears to be a phototype adaptation of Plantin Bold, with a non-standard “Venetian” e, that is a form with a diagonal bar. One version that goes by the name Plantin Ad Bold has such an alternate, but it’s different in other details. The copy is set in Futura (with liagtures for fi and ff), the small print in all-caps Trade Gothic.
4 Comments on “Gas Equipment Manufacturers ad (1967)”
Ha, reminds me of Mother’s Little Helper.
A Monotype version of Plantin Headline with tilted 'e’ was used in menus by the restaurant PizzaExpress. Looking at the pdf, it’s called PEPlantinHeadlineMT in medium and bold weights. It seems fractionally bolder and more condensed than this, though. It somehow ends up feeling a lot like the Elzevir/De Vinne faces, miles from Granjon.
I haven’t been able to find a tilted 'e’ in any metal-type period specimens of Plantin.
Thanks for the addition! Interesting. I didn’t even bother to check digital versions. For some reason, Monotype offers Plantin Headline from Fonts.com, but not via MyFonts, which makes it a hassle to look for possibly included alternates. Anyway, the “PE” in the font name suggests that this version was a custom one for Pizza Express.
Yes, that would be my guess. (I tracked down this old menu out of curiosity some time ago and thought about doing a post on it but didn’t think it was quite interesting enough.) Plantin Headline itself is attributed by the A-Z of Type Designers to Robin Nicholas and dated 1994 (p. 140). Plantin Ad Bold I haven’t seen. Is it a mod of Plantin Headline or something older?
It’s hard to confirm when PizzaExpress got their custom font as the Internet Archive tells me they didn’t publish pdf/image menus on their website until the 2000s. Saturday family lunches there in the 1990s were one of the big treats of my early childhood but my memory of specific fonts doesn’t stretch back that far! (They’ve also used an unmodified version of Plantin Headline and what seems to be a custom font based on their logo, and more recently Quadraat.)
Seeing this I now wonder whose idea the tilted ‘e’ was for PizzaExpress and why-did they have a common ancestor or did great minds think alike? My impression was the British Monotype had little market penetration in ad phototypesetting in this period (they did sell some machines to the USA but I suspect more for body text) so this is likely someone’s knockoff.