Folk legends Peter, Paul and Mary’s 1978 full length Reunion uses ITC Didi for its front and back cover title. Album credits are set in Century Schoolbook.

Allmusicguide.com’s Bruce Eder said about the album:

Much underrated, with a hauntingly beautiful version of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young.”

Design and art direction by Milton Glaser.

[More info on Discogs]

From Wikipedia:

Our Mother the Mountain is the second studio album by country singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt, released in 1969. It is considered to be one of his greatest recordings and features some of his best known works, including “Be Here To Love Me”, “Snake Mountain Blues” and “Our Mother The Mountain”. […] The artwork for Our Mother the Mountain was designed by Milton Glaser and the album cover features an arresting shot of Van Zandt taken by Allen Vogel.

The heavy geometric sans used for the title looks a lot like Futura Extra Bold (Intertype, 1952). In fact, it’s the earlier Airport Black, issued by Baltotype c.1943. Differences include the smaller counters (see for example the O), the lower crossbar in A, and the lighter middle bar in E, see this 1959 specimen. Photo-Lettering carried an adaptation of Airport Black for phototypesetting.

For the logo of Poppy Records, Glaser used his own Baby Teeth.

[More info on Discogs]

This compilation with “greatest hits” by Johann Strauss was recorded by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and released by Columbia Masterworks in 1969. The watercolor illustration is by Milton Glaser.

[More info on Discogs]

As we’ve documented before, users of Alphabet Lapidaire Monstre like to reduce the complexity of Jean Midolle’s 1830s piece of lettering. This album cover is another such example: all patterning is gone. So are the names at the bottom. The letterforms were made solid.

What’s left is the original white contour and the south-east shade with the extra split shadow line. That’s arguably still enough ornamentation. The modification also reveals the wonkiness of the underlying design, with a bulky S that feels much bolder than the A. If you’re after something with similar heft but a more balanced color, consider Jim Parkinson’s Sutro Deluxe.

The colorful art for this compilation of compositions by Mozart was provided by Milton Glaser.

[More info on Discogs]

Milton Glaser was a Lettera user. For this compilation with recordings of works by Beethoven, he* opted for Walter Haettenschweiler’s Strada. The bold condensed face with all weight allocated to the tops and bottoms was included in the third volume of the Swiss alphabet book series, published by Niggli in 1967. The massive overshoot in round letterforms (see “oven”) can be found back in the original.

*) That’s assuming Glaser handled the typography himself, in addition to providing the cover art. Maybe it was an uncredited typographer at Columbia Records.

Milton Glaser designed covers for a number of paperback editions of 19th-century novels by Russian authors: in 1960, he used Futura Display for The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy. A year later, he chose Bullfrog for Sergey Aksakov’s Family Chronicle. Also in 1961, Glaser picked Flirt for the Signet Classic edition of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls.

The Light weight of Glaser Stencil, put to early use by Milton Glaser himself, in the jacket design for Love Sounds by Gail Sheehy (1936–2020). “A novel” is added in Futura Light. Glaser’s stencil typeface also went by the names Neo Futura and Glaser Futura Stencil. The “Futura” part eventually was dropped, probably due to trademark considerations.

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.

Most of the text on the back and the inner flaps is set in Electra.

Picador’s 2022 softcover edition reuses the first-edition jacket, albeit with Helvetica in place of News Gothic.

Mirko Ilić:

One curiosity for my friends in the Balkans. This is the portrait of Radovan Karadzic, on the cover of The Nation, drawn in 1997 by Milton Glaser.

From Wikipedia:

Karadžić was accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) of personal and command responsibility for numerous war crimes committed against non-Serbs, in his roles as Supreme Commander of the Bosnian Serb armed forces and President of the National Security Council of the Republika Srpska. He was accused by the same authority of being responsible for the deaths of more than 7,500 Bosniaks (Muslims). Under his direction and command, Bosnian Serb forces initiated the Siege of Sarajevo.

Karadžić also was accused of ordering the Srebrenica genocide in 1995, which began on this day thirty years ago. At the time the magazine was issued, he had gone into hiding, and would not be arrested until July 2008. On 24 March 2016, he was found guilty of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to 40 years imprisonment.

Established in 1954 in Newport, Rhode Island, the Newport Jazz Festival was moved to New York City in 1972. For the occasion, the Russian Tea Room commissioned Milton Glaser to design a poster:

The Cossack is pouring vodka into the saxophone, ostensibly being imbibed by the musician.

For the copy, Glaser picked Métropolitaines, a top-heavy typeface inspired by the Art Nouveau lettering for the entrances to the Paris Metro, created by French architect and furniture designer Hector Guimard. The typeface originated at the Fonderie S. Berthier & Durey in 1905. Metropolitaines saw several adaptations for phototype. I’d assume that the version used by Glaser is the one shown by Photo-Lettering in their 1965 catalog.

Space Age is an extrabold counterless geometric sans designed by Murray Fuchs and issued by Photo-Lettering sometime after 1965. It came in three styles. In 1969, Milton Glaser chose Space Age A – with contour – for a Greatest Hits compilation of works by Rachmaninoff, released by Columbia Masterworks. He used it with slightly squooshed and partly overlapping letterforms and specified a different color for the contour.

[More info on Discogs]

Less than two years after the first Lettera compendium was published in Zürich, Schmalfette Grotesk had already reached New York, as evidenced by its appearance on this LP cover designed by Milton Glaser. It is used here for the title and the conductor’s name (though the latter misses an umlaut on the O), while all secondary information is in News Gothic Condensed.

[More info on Discogs]

Front cover. Baby Teeth’s staircase E is echoed in the brown door.

1970 double album by American comedian and activist Dick Gregory (1932–2017). Words from Dusty Groove:

Dick Gregory at his most righteous – recorded live at the Bronx Community College, and speaking on topics that include The Black Panthers, the Chicago 7, Black Power, Money, Patriots, Riots, and “Checking Out Whites”. Less funky than political – which actually makes it a lot more compelling than Gregory’s early work.

For the album art, Milton Glaser used the Opaque style (without counters) of his own Baby Teeth. The front cover shows the face of Frankenstein’s monster in a small window. On the gatefold, the creature is shown in full, dressed in stars and stripes, and now leaving his prison cell through the opened door. This picture was reproduced as a large foldout poster (34.2″×22.4″) that was included with the album.

[More info on Discogs]

Gatefold

Back cover with track list and credits in reversed Futura

Poster

Cover with a sticker advertising “Milton Glaser’s giant Frankenstein poster”

A 1969 double-page ad designed by Milton Glaser for Percobarb, Endo Pharmaceuticals’ brand name for oxycodone, an opioid used medically for treatment of moderate to severe pain.

When headache is severe enough to ask for help

The illustration can be read as a pained variation of Glasers iconic “Dylan” poster (1967), with the multicolored hair transformed into ominous thunderclouds from which lightning flashes. “Percobarb” is set in the North Shaded style of Glaser’s own Eightway, designed together with George Leavitt. The tagline is in Advertisers Gothic, with small copy set in Futura.

This work, along with numerous others, is included in Milton Glaser: Pop, a recently published monograph edited by Steven Heller, Mirko Ilić, and Beth Kleber.

Milton Glaser designed Eightway in or before 1969, together with lettering artist George Leavitt. In 1982, he used it himself for a retrospective double LP compilation by the rhythm and blues/rock and roll vocal group the Coasters. Named after their first hit from 1957, Young Blood was released on Atlantic/Deluxe.

Eightway Shaded Northeast is used with red and blue fill, respectively. All other text is set in a phototype version of Memphis.

[More info on Discogs]

See also the self-titled 1970 release by Barry Miles for an earlier example of Milton Glaser using his Eightway for an album cover.

Gatefold with track list and credits

Back cover with liner notes by Robert Palmer

Lovely use of Eightway, designed by Milton Glaser, for an album, also designed by Milton Glaser. The design is very much in keeping with the style that Milton started to employ in the 1970s—his own twist on Pop Art.

More information on the album itself can be found on Discogs.

Front cover (1973 reissue)

Released in 1968, Music from Big Pink is the debut studio album by the Band. The Canadian-American rock band had backed Bob Dylan on his 1966 tour (then still under their former name, the Hawks). According to Wikipedia,

Dylan offered to sing on the album, but ultimately realized it was important for the Band to make their own statement. Instead, Dylan signified his presence by contributing a cover painting.

The album design is by Milton Glaser, who also created the famous poster included in Dylan’s Greatest Hits album from 1967. While the front cover with Dylan’s painting of six musicians and an elephant is devoid of any typography, the back cover presents the title in big black capitals from Egyptienne Bold Condensed, with one word per line. Photography by Elliott Landy.

[More info on Discogs]

Back cover (1973 reissue). The album was named after “Big Pink”, a house shared by band members Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson in West Saugerties, New York, where some of the music was composed. Smaller text is set in Helvetica and News Gothic.

Gatefold (1978 reissue). The typeface used for the band member’s names, the track list and other text is Bookman.

Back and front cover (1978 reissue)

No more space for ambiguity: this CD edition places the band name and the album title on the front cover.

I’m a Stranger Too! is the debut release by folk/blues singer-songwriter Christopher Smither (b. 1944). It came out in 1970 on Poppy Records, a label founded by Kevin Eggers (1943–2020, later of Tomato Records) that lasted from around 1967 to 1974.

The cover design is by Milton Glaser, who also takes credit for the poppy flower on the record label. The wide caps are shown by Photo-Lettering as Push Pin Art Deko, without individual credits, but with Milton Glaser’s name in the sample text. Chances are that Glaser designed them specifically for an exhibition poster earlier in 1970, and that Photo-Lettering subsequently made the alphabet available for general use. Unlike Baby Teeth – which was shown on the same page of PLINC’s 1971 catalog – Push Pin Art Deko wasn’t a big hit. This album cover is the only other use of it that I’m aware of.

See also the “Poppy Gives Thanks” poster. Designed by Glaser for a label night in 1969, it’s among the earliest uses of his Glaser Stencil.

[More info on Discogs]

Detail showing the overlapping letters filled in six colors

The back cover reveals Smither’s face that’s obscured on the front. Track list and credits are set in Futura

The record label with Glaser’s illustrated poppy and text printed in Helvetica

Poster for an Art Deco exhibition shown at the Finch College Museum of Art in fall 1970. Finch College was a liberal arts college in Manhattan. It closed in 1976.

The poster measuring 24″×36″ was designed by Milton Glaser of Push Pin Studios. He used a typeface that may have been designed specifically for this occasion. At least that’s what its name suggest: it’s presented in PLINC’s 1971 catalog as Push Pin Art Deko. The showing doesn’t include individual credits, but it mentions Milton Glaser’s name in the sample text, suggesting that it was him who designed the typeface as well.

The wide open caps feature several traits that are characteristic for the Art Deco style: a geometric build with pointed apexes, an S with three horizontals (compare to the lettering in Cassandre’s Nord Express poster from 1927), and an A with a triangle as bar (see Pierre Zenobel’s A New Blue Train to the Cote d’Azur poster from 1928, as well as to period typefaces like Novel Gothic or Vulcain). PLINC’s one-line sample has other glyphs for A and E than the poster, suggesting that Push Pin Art Deko came with alternates.

Milton Glaser Inc. mentions that the poster “employed two split fountains on the press in order to create the effect of a full color announcement [in just two print runs]. Of course, this requires a sympathetic pressman and willingness to spend a lot of time adjusting the results.”

Hat tip to the Herb Lubalin Study Center.

Push Pin Art Deko as shown in Photo-Lettering’s One Line Manual of Styles, 1971

Detail with the filled-in and overlapping letterforms of Push Pin Art Deko

When the exhibition moved to Cranbrook Academy in January 1971, Glaser had the poster reprinted, now on pale yellow paper, which further increases its overall colorfulness, as he explains in his 1973 monograph.

A copy of the Cranbrook College version is currently on sale from renewfinds.

Franklin Gothic as used by Milton Glaser. This poster was designed for Dionne Warwick’s debut performance at the Philharmonic Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center on September 25, 1966. From 1stDibs:

With backing by a 24-piece orchestra led by composer Burt Bacharach and support from Anthony and The Imperials, Warwick wowed the near capacity audience with showstoppers “Who Can I Turn To,” “Don't Make Me Over,” “People” and “Somewhere.” “When it came to emotion-packed, soulful interpretations of ballads,” Billboard magazine reported the following week, “Miss Warwick was second to none.” An example of this poster is held in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC.

See more posters designed by Glaser for the Lincoln Center.

Detail

Detail