John & Mimi by John and Mimi Lobell, St. Martin’s Press
.jpg)
Rudolf Koch’s multiline Prisma from the early 1930s, in use on the first-edition jacket of John & Mimi. A Free Marriage by St. Martin’s Press.
The uncredited designer integrated the male (♂) and female signs (♀︎) into the names, and also grafted an ampersand (&) onto the left stem of the M. The O with arrow is actually an upside-down Q with an elongated bar, terminated with a double angle quotation mark, a.k.a. guillemets. The cross for the female sign might have been obtained by repurposing parts of the numeral 4. Chances are this composition was made using the Letraset adaptation – which was issued in 1972, the year the book came out. The hand-on approach of dry transfer lettering suggested such creative use of letterforms and parts thereof.
See also the cover of Bantam’s mass-market paperback from 1973.
A sheet of 72pt Letraset Prisma
Detail
