Edwin Starr – “Twentyfive Miles” German single cover

Sleeve design for the 1969 German release of Edwin Starr’s “Twentyfive Miles”.

The most interesting aspect of this (uncredited) single cover design is probably the typeface story of the font in use: Charrette (released by Letraset before 1976) or rather likely Charrette’s predecessor French Stencil, published by Rapitype. Both are based on the same design of common French stencils.

In this blog post, a must-read for anyone interested in stencil type, James Mosley tells a combined first-, second-, and third-hand story of French stencils including the origin of Charrette:

I bought sets of stencils myself in Paris and used them to mark all kinds of things – folders of current work, and the numbers on new mobile shelving that was being installed in the St Bride Library, where they still survive.

When the makers of ‘Rapitype’, a rival to Letraset’s rub-down lettering, launched their product in about 1970 and were seeking new designs, I offered my stencils. They were marketed under the original name of ‘French Stencil’, and were perhaps the first font of this kind to be made.

Letraset did not get the message for another decade. When Letraset France launched an almost identical font under the name of ‘Charrette’ (the French word for a rustic two-wheeled cart, which the English company misspelled ‘Charette’), it got into trouble with the Fondation Le Corbusier for having used letters that they piously believed to have been designed by the great man for his own exclusive use. So the Letraset catalogues obediently and absurdly marked them ‘© Le Corbusier’.

For those curious about the Le Corbusier connection, see also this post on architecture blog SIAS/designnotebook: The Architect’s Font: Stencil Faces (01 Le Corbusier)