The Mystery of the Dune Font

21 Comments on “The Mystery of the Dune Font”

1. Tony Dardis says:

   Jan 27th, 2023 12:02 pm

   My father, Tom Dardis, was editor-in-chief at Berkley in 1965 (until 1972). I know he cared about typefaces. I don’t know what his involvement was with the design of the original Dune.

2. Florian Hardwig says:

   Jan 27th, 2023 1:01 pm

   Thank you for your comment, Tony. Tom Dardis was one of several names I came across while looking for people who might have been involved in the typeface selection and typographic design. Unfortunately, this aspect – unlike the cover art – is hardly ever credited, and it’s difficult to find out any details some fifty years later. It must have been someone who was on staff in 1975, and – assumably – in the role of an art director. Your father might have known that person.

3. Paul Nouveaufan says:

   Jan 27th, 2023 3:25 pm

   Thank you so much for this article! I have an affection for 1960s-70s/art nouveau-crossover typography and have previously searched unsuccesfully for information about this typeface. It’s amazing to have found your article just a day after you posted it.
   
   Orthodox Herbertarian is a good freebie, but as you say, it would be great to see a full digitization of Davison Art Nouveau.

4. Mark Simonson says:

   Jan 27th, 2023 3:44 pm

   Davison Art Nouveau is one of those faces that is so strongly associated with a specific use (typecast, you could say) that it would be difficult to use it for anything else without seeming to reference Dune or Herbert.

   Also, so glad you managed to identify it. I gave up years ago.

5. Johanan Ottensooser says:

   Jan 27th, 2023 6:57 pm

   Mark, super appreciate “typecast” there mate

6. Florian Hardwig says:

   Jan 27th, 2023 8:09 pm

   Thanks, Mark. I tend to agree. Then again, the covers employed only a fraction of the typeface’s possibilities. I can imagine that Davison Art Nouveau used without stretching and with some of its other letterform variants – either the straighter ones or those with the extending flourishes – wouldn’t evoke Dune or Herbert. I found a number of other uses of Davison Art Nouveau, some of which I’ll post later, but those all predate this use, suggesting that the typeface was indeed considered “taken” for a long time. Today there are younger generations who have never seen these editions. When they hear Dune, they might rather think of the typographic design made for the 2021 film.

7. Florian Hardwig says:

   Jan 28th, 2023 9:28 am

   I have a theory about the inspiration to Davison Art Nouveau. The album cover of South of the Border by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass from 1964 obviously is lettering, and predates the PLINC release from 1967. I wonder, though, whether Davison got the idea to his typeface after seeing it. Or maybe he was responsible for the album lettering himself, and refined this style into Art Nouveau a few years later?

   The lettering has more than a few similarities with the typeface, from the long bracketed serifs and the “roofed” A, to the H with bulging crossbar. There are also swashy extensions. Most strikingly, O and D have that bulb-shaped “internal terminal”. In the album lettering, this feature is flipped compared to Art Nouveau – the bulb there sits south of the center. The image below shows a detail of the cover, compared to selected glyphs from Davison Art Nouveau.

   

   The cover design is credited to Apple Graphics, a company that worked on several dozen albums between around 1964 and 1971, often in collaboration with art director Peter Whorf.

   Mark, I recall your blog post about this record cover, where you speculated whether the lettering might be by Ed Benguiat – Benguiat would have overseen Davison Art Nouveau in his role as PLINC’s typographic design director.

8. Florian Hardwig says:

   Jan 29th, 2023 5:18 pm

   Given that Art Nouveau came with so many alternates, its use for Dune and beyond is impressively consistent. Across the dozens of applications, only a handful of variant glyphs were employed

   There is one outlier among the covers I didn’t include: Berkley’s editions of The Santaroga Barrier (1968) published between 1978 and 1985 use Davison Art Nouveau with various alternates. Not only that, they are here even used side by side. We get to see two forms for A, B, E, and R, plus a descending S that didn’t appear on other books by Herbert, as far as I can tell.

   

9. Patreeko says:

   Feb 3rd, 2023 4:57 am

   This is kismet. First off, you published this on my birthday. Secondly, I’m working on a Dune related art project and I’ve tried using Orthodox Herbertarian and while it is lovely, it just doesn’t work for text. Out of that frustration I just did a search that led me here. I am quite positive I have seen either the alternate versions of Davison with the swoopy serifs on 70s album covers… or I’ve seen an actual Art Nouveau typeface that inspired it. I’m digging through my art books now (in the middle of the night) seeing if I can stumble upon that reference. This is very exciting!

10. Patreeko says:

    Feb 3rd, 2023 5:00 am

    Ahhh! Just scrolled down and saw Rod McKuen! Of course! His books are a great reference for an italicized version!

11. Patreeko says:

    Feb 3rd, 2023 3:47 pm

    I’ve found some potential references in Nouveau poster art. “La Passion” by Alphonse Mucha features a very similar serif typeface, and usefully has 16 lowercase letters. It is skinny more like the book covers than the blockier Davison typeface. Secondly, in his poster art, Jules Chéret often used similar hand drawn letterforms in a looser style, with many examples of lowercase letters. Another example is a poster for Cognac J. Dupond & Co. by V. Bocchino with the ascender on the N like one of the variant types.

    For modern typefaces, I found that Baylac designed by Gérard Mariscalchi in 2006 has a similar feel. And the lowercase letters do resemble those of Jules Chéret’s posters. It is a licensed font so I would not propose anyone steal from it, but it shows proof of concept for a lowercase for Davison Art Nouveau. The book and album covers you have assembled should be enough to begin reconstructing the type, but just how many variant letters are there? Over half a dozen A’s alone!

    The Rod McKuen book reminded me that Lonesome Cities also used the same skinny italicized version of Davison. Although sadly, his album Rod McKuen Takes a San Franscisco Hippie Trip does not.

12. Florian Hardwig says:

    Feb 3rd, 2023 9:36 pm

    Patreeko, thanks for your comments. Happy to hear you like the article.

    Yes, Davison Art Nouveau (or Orthodox Herbertarian, for that matter) is a display typeface by all means. As a bold all-caps face, it shouldn’t be used for text, even without swashes. The designers of the covers shown above were aware that it only works in large sizes, and used Friz Quadrata for smaller lines (I wouldn’t call those “text” in the narrow sense, and Friz Quadrata isn’t a text typeface either).

    The type used on the Rod McKuen cover is not a proper italic – Davison Art Nouveau didn’t have an italic style – but simply a slanted version, with all the downsides that such a treatment entails. I find it rather ugly, and wouldn’t use it as a reference for an italic.

    You mentioned Mucha’s “La Passion” and Bocchino’s poster for J. Dupont & Co. These works from the Art Nouveau period feature seriffed letterforms, but that’s about where the similarities end. In both examples, the serifs are small (“flare serifs“) and the stroke contrast – the difference between thicks and thins – is barely noticeable. Davison Art Nouveau has pretty long serifs and a distinct contrast. I appreciate your effort to find possible precursors, but I’d argue that there are plenty of typefaces that come closer to these examples than Davison Art Nouveau does.

    

    

    I don’t think that Dave Davison based his design on works from around 1900. Maybe he found inspiration for some details like the curved and curling crossbars in period designs. However, the basic design – shown in the first line of the specimen – minus the flourishes doesn’t strike me as particularly Art Nouveau-ish.

    should be enough to begin reconstructing the type

    As I mentioned, the original PLINC assets were acquired by House Industries. These probably also include the plate(s) for Davison Art Nouveau, complete with all alternates and extras. Instead of reverse-engineering the typeface from limited and distorted samples, I’d recommend to ask House Industries if they intend to digitize Art Nouveau. If they don’t, they might be open to let someone else have a go at it, and provide the source material. Of course it’s also possible to draw an interpretation without their blessing, but I believe the right way to approach such revivals is to talk to the IP owner.

13. Patreeko says:

    Feb 4th, 2023 3:01 am

    Thank you for the response. For the Mucha poster, my focus was more on the text at the bottom. And I wasn’t implying that this is a direct reference, more that it shows how the letter have been modified from the plain Roman style to these “Nouveau” styles and to give some indication of generally how lowercase letters could look. The A, E and H in “Jean Sebastian Bach” especially have similar modifications as some of the variant letters. If Davison originally never designed lowercase letters, then even an official digitization would likely still lack them. I also wonder if an official version would bother with all of the wild variant letters? Or with a true italics?

    For my own project I had thought about taking Orthodox Herbertarian as a reference point for generating a thinner font that could actually be used for text, or at least for titles smaller than an inch tall. It would be something in the same “family” but be more appropriate for wider use cases. The wide variety of variants really give some fodder for the imagination!

14. J'Ro says:

    Feb 12th, 2023 1:36 pm

    I realised from the dates in this article that I was reading most of Frank Herbert’s books when they were first published, … because I read every paperback that the public library put in its Science Fiction section.

15. Hrant Papazian says:

    Mar 5th, 2023 7:28 pm

    What about this one?
    It has some cool notan play…

16. Florian Hardwig says:

    Mar 5th, 2023 8:37 pm

    Yep, that one was covered in the first Dune-related post on Fonts In Use, thanks to Brian Phillips.

    

17. Pablo Lara H. says:

    Mar 5th, 2023 9:53 pm

    First edition/First printing dust jacket for Frank Herbert’s Dune, Philadelphia/New York: Chilton Books, a division of Chilton Company, 1965

    
    

    The image is taken from nocloo.com’s First Edition Identification Guide.

18. Florian Hardwig says:

    Mar 6th, 2023 8:42 am

    Hi Pablo, right, that’s another iconic style associated with Dune. I didn’t add it to Fonts In Use, as the title doesn’t use a font, but is custom lettering. The author name is in Futura Extra Bold Condensed Italic and the flap text in Futura, but that’s not very interesting, typography-wise. I’d love to know who did the reverse-contrast lettering, though. I doubt it’s by John Schoenherr who’s credited for the cover art.

    

    I’m not aware of any fonts that come particularly close. Crayonette DJR is in the same ballpark, but has neither joined letters nor such dramatic caps.

19. Florian Hardwig says:

    Mar 6th, 2023 5:11 pm

    The swashed variant of Newsagent (Beasts of England, 2022) is a contemporary typeface that has a similarly floral feel as Davison Art Nouveau:

    

20. Patreeko says:

    Mar 17th, 2023 5:47 pm

    I recently ran into someone wearing this hoodie. The shapes of the letters are more like the Friend & Lover drawn letters without true serifs, but the E and F look very much like Davison Art Nouveau. The swashes resemble the ones on the Better Homes & Gardens cover, but curved instead of straight.

21. Florian Hardwig says:

    Mar 18th, 2023 6:05 am

    

    The “Perfect Day IPA” uses a typeface named Wonderbar 2. It was designed by Dennis Ludlow in 2020. Wonderbar 2 is bolder and has hardly any thick-thin contrast, but yes, the curling middle bars and the swashiness are traits it has in common with Davison art Nouveau.