Ethnic Groups in Comparative Perspective book series

Published May 26, 2023

Ethnic Groups in Comparative Perspective is a series of books edited by Peter Isaac Rose and published by Random House between 1970 and 1974 in at least seven volumes.

For the covers, designer John Murello worked with a typeface that was made available only a year before, in 1969. It’s Eightway, a collaboration between Milton Glaser and George Leavitt. Leavitt is credited with the lettering execution for most of Glaser’s typeface designs issued through Photo-Lettering. Eightway is the only one to include his name alongside Glaser’s: the all-caps sans with the eightway shadow is listed as Glaser-Leavitt Eightway in the catalogs by the New York typesetting company. Is this because Leavitt provided more creative input than with Glaser Stencil, Baby Teeth, Baby Fat? Or is it an acknowledgment that he had to draw so many different variations to bring the concept to life?

Murello built a typographic pattern by listing the various ethnic groups in two opposing styles from the Eightway series, the Southeast and the Northwest. Just like the type styles, each of the groups is unique and may come from a different direction, but in the end, they are all cut from the same cloth.

The interior design is credited to Karin Batten. She specified Ruzicka’s Primer for text and paired it with Novarese’s Nova Augustea for titles.

Eight shadow directions, in Outline and Shaded styles: all sixteen variations of Glaser-Leavitt Eightway as introduced in Photo-Lettering’s 1969 Alphabet Yearbook