Varsity Singers and Orchestra – Selections From South Pacific album art
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Bart Solenthaler and tagged with “airportblack”, “franklingothic” and “futura”. License: All Rights Reserved.
Cover for an album with selections from the musical South Pacific, recorded by the Varsity Singers and Orchestra and released by Gramophone Records in 1954. There’s also a later release with a blue cover variant.
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For the most part, Baltotype’s Airport series is a copy of Paul Renner’s Futura. Not so the Black.
Bauer’s geometric sans series was complemented by the stencil-like Futura Black, but it didn’t offer a weight bolder than fett (1928). Other companies realized that there’s demand for such a cut, especially in advertising and display typography. The Baltimore Type Co. issued Airport Black as foundry type around 1943. ATF has Spartan Extra Black, and Ludlow had Tempo Black. Intertype introduced Futura Extra Bold for machine composition in 1952, and Monotype made Twentieth Century Ultrabold. Around 1953, Filmotype added Free to their library for phototypesetting. The geometric sans may have originated in Germany in the late 1920s, but the extrabold weights were invented in the United States about a quarter century later.
Some of these extensions were later incorporated into the Futura family: Letraset’s Futura Extra Bold is actually Twentieth Century Ultrabold. And Intertype’s Futura Extra Bold ended up in many digital versions of Futura.