The Pump House Gang by Tom Wolfe
Source: www.abebooks.com RT Books. License: All Rights Reserved.
Eightway is a variation on Thorowgood’s classic Sans Serif Shaded which was first shown in 1839 as Sans Surryphs Shaded. Designed by Milton Glaser with George Leavitt, Eightway is distinguished by a more compact build with straight-sided rounds – and by the fact that it comes in variants with eight different shadow directions.
As the capitals of the Latin alphabet tend to be more busy to the right – think E or R – signpainters traditionally add the shadow on the left: this way, they need fewer brushstrokes and get the job done more quickly. In type design, such considerations of speed don’t play a big role. Once implemented in a typeface, the designed glyphs can be reproduced again and again. In consequence, the vast majority of shaded typefaces opt for the more elaborate shadow to the right, see for example Broadcast, Beton licht, Umbra, Profil, Phoebus, Forum II, etc.
Here’s another example of Eightway used by Glaser himself, for the first-edition jacket of The Pump House Gang. In this 1968 collection of essays and articles, Tom Wolfe documents the 1960s counterculture of the USA in general and New York in particular.
Source: www.abebooks.com Bren-Books. License: All Rights Reserved.
Most of the text on the back and the inner flaps is set in Electra.
Source: www.abebooks.com Second Story Books. License: All Rights Reserved.
License: All Rights Reserved.
Picador’s 2022 softcover edition reuses the first-edition jacket, albeit with Helvetica in place of News Gothic.
This post was originally published at Fonts In Use