Briefings: Poems Small and Easy by A.R. Ammons
For most of her jacket and cover designs, Ursula Suess created custom lettering. Sometimes she’d use her own typeface design, Book Jacket. And sometimes she’d work with typefaces by others. This is such an example, for a commission by W.W. Norton & Company in 1971.
The typeface is Jay Gothic, used here exclusively in lowercase, with tight letterspacing, shown in reverse against black-and-white photography. Originally made available via Photo-Lettering under the name Schechter Marksman Gothic in 1963, the spurless sans with the boxy built was selected in competitions sponsored by Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC) – the Bold won in 1965, and the Regular in 1966. It subsequently was made available as Jay Gothic. Suess’s own typeface designs were later released with VGC, too.
Talking about competitions: Briefings was a finalist in the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry. A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) would win the award in 1973, for Collected Poems, 1951–1971, and again in 1993 for Garbage. The promotional sticker tells us that Ammons previously won the Bollingen Prize in Poetry for Sphere.
