Tom and Jerry’s Merry Christmas (1980s)
This Christmas-themed book featuring Tom and Jerry was first published in the Little Golden Books series in 1954. The story is by Peter Archer, the pictures by MGM Cartoons. Harvey Eisenberg and Samuel Armstrong are credited for the adaptation. Several editions followed over the decades, with various catalog numbers and changing cover designs. Shown here is an undated edition, from sometime after 1980.
The bold italic caps with shadow effect and initial swash M are from a typeface I haven’t seen in use before. It’s Fette Copra-Kursiv, Cooper Black’s brother from another mother, or, more precisely, its alternate italic from another foundry. After Oswald Cooper’s Cooper Black was issued by Barnhart Brothers & Spindler in Chicago in 1922, the design was licensed by Schriftguss AG vorm. Brüder Butter, a foundry in Dresden, Germany, who sold their version of it as Fette Cooper, or Cooper fett.
When the Germans wanted to add an italic to their library, they didn’t license BB&S’s for some reason – probably cost, but maybe also different design ideas – and rather cut their own version. Fette Copra-Kursiv (1929) is different from Cooper Black Italic (1926) in various details: some of the caps like H M N (but also r) have an uptick at the bottom right, A has a flat roof, G is bearded, t is pointed, g is single-story. The forms for V and W with vertical stems as well as the 7 with crossbar are more in tune with the German lettering tradition that was infused with blackletter traits. See also the visual comparison at the end of this post.
Fette Copra-Kursiv must have been adopted for phototypesetting at some point, but I don’t know which manufacturer takes credit for the revival and the apparent addition of swash alternates.
The title page features a bichromatic setting of Fette Copra-Kursiv in shaded caps. Credits are in ITC Souvenir (1970).
The text typeface is a peculiar one, too: it’s Icone, designed by Adrian Frutiger and issued by Linotype in 1980.
Spread from the Fette Copra-Kursiv specimen (Schriftguss, 1929). Tholenaar Collection, Letterform Archive
The book title in the phototype version of Fette Copra-Kursiv (top), compared to a resetting in Cooper Black Italic (Adobe’s digitization, bottom). In Schriftguss’s original foundry version, Y descends below the baseline.
