Travels in Two Democracies by Edmund Wilson
Book jacket (front)
The first edition of Edmund Wilson’s Travels in Two Democracies uses two weights from Signal. Designed by Walter Wege, this non-kerning informal script was first cast by the Berthold foundry in Berlin. While the title on the book jacket is set in the regular weight from 1931, the cloth cover sports the lighter Script-Signal that was added in 1932. Both times the words are placed on a sloping baseline, counterbalancing the slant of the script letters.
Ralf Herrmann currently is running a campaign to fund the creation of a faithful digitization of all three weights of Signal, including the bold Block-Signal not featured in this use, plus a variable version. If you want to help the project to reach its goal, you can do so for a couple more days, until November 21, 2023.
“Expensive hand lettering? Certainly not” – Signal was imported to the United States by Continental Typefounders Association, Inc. This advert mentioning all three weights and showing the bold Block-Signal (alongside Stempel’s Zarte Memphis) was included in the November 1934 issue of Advertising Arts.
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) is best known as literary critic, but also was an author of poetry, fiction, memoirs, and more. Travels in Two Democracies is one of his political writings, in which he compares life in the Depression-era United States and in the Soviet Union. The book was published in 1936, a few years after diplomatic relations between the two nations were established – and shortly before Stalin instituted the Great Purge, consolidating power to become a dictator.
The book typography is credited to Robert Josephy. Chances are he designed the jacket and cover as well.
The author’s name is set in caps from Stymie.
Book cover with the title in the lighter Script-Signal
Book cover with spine
Full jacket. Additional text on the back and the inner flaps is set in Bodoni, ATF Garamond, and Vogue. From the book’s description:
In a special sense, Edmund Wilson was well qualified to do this book, because during his long visit to Russia he discovered exactly what it meant to be an American, and he came back with a strong sense of his own nationality. “I feel convinced,” he writes, “that American republican institutions, disastrously as they are always being abused, have some permanent and absolute value.” He adds, however: “We shall be in no position to reprove the Russians till we shall he able to show them an American socialism which is free from the Russian defects.”
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See more Signal used in the United States in the 1930s, including the jacket for Erskine Caldwell’s North of the Danube: