The Radio Planet is a science fiction novel written by Roger Sherman Hoar (1887–1963) under the pseudonym of Ralph Milne Farley. The third instalment in his Radio Man series, it was first serialized in Argosy, in six parts, starting 26 June, 1926.

This is the first book edition, published as Ace Book F-312 in 1964, with cover art by John Schoenherr. The (uncredited) typography combines Peignot Bold with Latin Bold.

Fun fact: in his other life, Hoar served as state senator and assistant Attorney General for the state of Massachusetts.

[More info on ISFDB]

Before Graham Masterton was known for writing The Manitou, he wrote stories about a woman and her confessions.

Confessions of a Racy Receptionist (Or, what happens when a 44-24-37 girl goes 9 to 5!) is one of the two stories in the Confessions series. Cover artwork is credited to Bill Wenzel. The book title features a very groovy-looking Caruso Roxy [edit: it’s Holiday, see comments], followed by Trade Gothic. If I had one confession to make: It’s definitely the most 70s type I’ve ever seen.

Benard Glemser’s novel about prospective stewardess Carol Thompson was originally published by Random House as Girl on a Wing in 1960, with a much classier cover. It 1963, it was made into a movie entitled Come Fly With Me and re-issued by Bantam as The Fly Girls. In 1969, Bantam brought out a new paperback edition with a sexist cover design that obviously jumped on the bandwagon of the top-selling Coffee Tea or Me from 1967.

I’m adding it here because of the cover typeface which hasn’t come up a lot on Fonts In Use before: West Roma is wider than Caruso Roxy, but has an overall similar feel. Drawn by Dave West in the second half of the 1960s, Photo-Lettering grouped it together with Roxy, Roxanna, Loose New Roman and Fantasia in a section named “Curled Casual Latins”.

Glemser and Bantam tried to squeeze even more out of the trend, and issued the sequel The Super-Jet Girls and a new edition of Here Come The Brides in 1971. Despite playing it safe with Caruso Roxy on the cover, these books weren’t as big a hit. What they did succeed in was further tainting Roxy as the stereotypical typeface for the lewd aspects of the Swinging Sixties.

Battle Mask, 1970. Secondary text is in Trade Gothic and Gothic No. 13 or similar.

Matterhorn is used for Don Pendleton’s The Executioner series from Pinnacle Books. Shown above is the first printing of the third book, Battle Mask, published in April 1970. The shorter bar in the first letter of the tt combo and the shorter bottom bar in E are likely contextual modifications. This masthead became the standard for the series starting with the the seventh book and the series’ many reprints until sometime in the late 1970s, several of which are shown below.

From Wikipedia:

The Executioner (a.k.a. Mack Bolan) is a monthly men's action-adventure paperback book series (published from 1969–2020) following the exploits of the character Mack Bolan and his wars against organized crime and international terrorism. The series has sold more than 200 million copies since its 1969 debut installment, War Against the Mafia.

The regular series includes 464 novels (as of December 2020 when the series ended). […] The Executioner was created and initially written by American author Don Pendleton, who penned 37 of the original 38 Bolan novels (he did not write #16).

War Against the Mafia, 1972 (8th printing)

Death Squad, 1971. Text in the angled band is in Eurostile Bold Condensed and the synopsis in Helvetica Bold.

Miami Massacre, 1970. Text in the angled band is in Franklin Gothic and the synopsis in Helvetica Condensed.

Continental Contract, 1971

Assault on Soho, 1978. Matterhorn is paired with two weights of Helvetica Condensed.

Nightmare in New York, 1971

Chicago Wipe-Out, 1978

Vegas Vendetta, 1979. Text in the angled band is in Akzidenz-Grotesk Condensed and the synopsis in Trade Gothic Bold.

Caribbean Kill, 1972

California Hit, 1972

Boston Blitz, 1974

Washington I.O.U., 1978

San Diego Siege, 1972. Cover art by Gil Cohen.

Panic in Philly, 1973. Cover art by Gil Cohen.

Sicilian Slaughter by Jim Peterson, 1973

Three husbands had died mysteriously at Mallory Hall. Was Janet about to become the fourth widow?

Fawcett Gold Medal Books published The Curse of Mallory Hall, a novel by Dorothy Daniels (1915–2001), in two cover variants. One (shown above) exclusively features Oz Cooper’s Cooper Black Italic (1926). The other (below) goes a little harder: here, the title is set in the italic style of Benguiat Cooper Black Swash, a variant by Ed Benguiat that adds extra weight and swagger.

Front cover

The Silken Underground is a lesbian novel written by Vicki Spain and published in 1965 by Lancer Books under the Domino imprint.

The title uses Staudel Xenotype J. The tagline on the back cover uses Franklin Gothic Condensed. The rest of the text is in News Gothic Condensed.

Back cover

Twentieth Century Ultrabold is set stacked and staggered, with tightly spaced lines and letters and an omitted i dot.

Avon published a number of paperback editions of books by three-time Nebula Award winner Roger Zelazny (1937–1995). The series design features big type in Twentieth Century Ultrabold, tightly spaced and in white against black, with the colored art by Ron Walotsky sandwiched between author name and title. Smaller text is added in all-caps Helvetica. No typographer is credited.

If the info on Internet Speculative Fiction Database is correct, the first books issued in this design were Lord of Light in January 1969 and Creatures of Light and Darkness in August 1970. Additional titles followed after a longer break, starting with the first three books from The Chronicles of Amber: Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, Sign of the Unicorn, all in 1976; then Doorways in the Sand and The Hand of Oberon, both in 1977. The final book in this design was The Courts of Chaos in 1979. It was continued for reprints until 1983. The first four books in the Chronicles of Amber series were also published in a box set titled The Four Amber Novels.

The same lockup was also used on the title page.

Doorways in the Sand is the only book to feature a purple background.

Award-winning spy novel by Scott C.S. Stone (1932–2006). The cover for the Fawcett Gold Medal paperback edition from 1969 brings together an illustration by Robert McGinnis and the bold weight of Dave West’s Cooper Nouveau Swash.

From Good Reads:

The Dragon’s Eye takes us behind the Bamboo Curtain into a world of espionage and intrigue in China. […] In 1969, [it] won the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award as the best original softcover suspense novel published in America.

Full cover spread for Double Black Diamond

Double Black Diamond is a collaborative story collection by Mads Gobbo and Miles Klee. The stories are funny and fabulist, drawing influence from the pair’s shared canon of writers like Donald Barthelme, Kelly Link, Steven Millhauser, Mary Robison, Brian Evenson, Rachel Ingalls, Kathryn Davis, George Saunders, and others.

Though the stories present our world as deranged—accurately so—they are never misanthropic, always finding the humor in our abjection. Rather than try to clean up the radioactive waste, they will play in it until their third eye opens and they’re glowing green, just like the forms and fonts of the book’s cover. These mutant greens—derived from the cover art’s background, a satellite image of an algal bloom in the Baltic Sea*—emanate from the title font, Siegfried, a product of the art nouveau era that was popularized again during that style’s revival in psychedelia, and the body font, Roslindale, a chubby but angled serif, that adds an element of playful, pulp horror.

The other primary cover font is Quixley, which many will recognize as the title font of The Phantom Tollbooth. This is the other major strain coursing through the stories, a love of classic children’s literature, especially books where danger and wonder mix. In addition to their role as author, Mads Gobbo illustrated the collection, influenced by the art of Tove Jansson, Shel Silverstein, and Tim Jacobus. These artists have a talent for teasing mystery on the other side of various thresholds—fantastical beasts hiding in the shadows of a forest, an abyss of possibilities where the sidewalk ends, or a curtain of dripping slime—this lattermost image informing the alien frame around the cover text. Quixley is iconic for just this reason, signaling the toll we must pay to enter “the Lands Beyond.”

The last sources of inspiration come from a similar retrospection. Prompted by the title’s evocation of classic ski maps, the design returns to kitsch artifacts of the American midcentury. Paul Bacon’s Big Book Look informs the cover text while Milton Bradley board games, especially Chutes and Ladders, inspire the table of contents, which offer a twisting, turning path through Mads’ illustrations.

*) The image was taken by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission in 2019 and is part of the Observing the Earth database (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO license).

Interior cover and title page of Double Black Diamond

Table of contents for Double Black Diamond

Interior spread from Double Black Diamond

Not of This World, 1973

Two books by Peter Kolosimo (1922–1984), one of the founders of pseudoarchaeology who popularized ancient astronaut theories of contact between extraterrestrial beings and ancient human civilizations, published by Bantam Books in the 1970s.

The titles are set in caps from West Behemoth (1960), with contour and drop shadow. The author’s name and the teasers use the similar – but much older – Egyptienne Bold Condensed. Caledonia is used for the lists of topics, with ellipses for the first book and question marks for the second one.

Timeless Earth, 1975

First edition of Gwen, in Green, an eco-horror novel by Hugh Zachary (1928–2016), with cover art by Polish-American artist and Holocaust survivor George Ziel (born Jerzy Zielezinski, 1914–1982). The uncredited typography features a chromatic setting of Gonzales Flair.

[More info on ISFDB]

The story titles and bylines in this issue of Startling Stories from January 1948 use the bold weight of Ultra-Modern, a typeface designed by Douglas C. McMurtrie and issued by Ludlow in 1928.

The pages depict the beginnings of The Blue Flamingo, a novel by Hannes Bok, and Ultra Evolution by Polton Cross (a pseudonym by John Russell Fearn). The deck is set in Memphis Italic and the text typeface appears to be Excelsior or similar, with drop caps from Ultra Bodoni. Captions use Metroblack with its original forms.

Startling Stories was a pulp science fiction magazine that ran from 1939 to 1955. It was published by Ned Pines’ Better Publications, which was known as Beacon Magazines until 1937 and as Standard Magazines from 1943. While the publisher was based in Chicago, the editorial offices were located in New York at the time.

The Disobedient Daughter, June 1982

Before Barbara Hazard (1931–2019) started to write poetry (at sixty) and to quilt (at seventy), she already explored several other creative fields. In 1953, she graduated from Rhode Island School of Design and worked as a graphic designer for an advertising firm in Concord, New Hampshire. Hazard also trained as a musician and studied oil painting with Amy Jones. According to Open Library’s bio –

she began to write historical fiction in 1978. First published in 1981, she went on to write and publish 48 books, several of which are also in circulation abroad. She won several awards for her writing.

Shown here are the covers of fourteen romance novels published in the Signet Regency Romance series between 1982 and 1988. The title typeface on all of them is Reid Bookman. This Bookman variety was drawn by William Reid in a single Italic Swash style and issued by Photo-Lettering in 1967. Between the fourteen covers, we get to see a good chunk of Reid Bookman’s character set – including the q and the Q.

It’s not clear who was responsible for the typography. With her background in graphic design, Hazard might have had a say in it herself. In any case, the art is not by her: thirteen of the covers were illustrated by Allan Kass. Only one title, The Rake’s Protégée, has art by Walter Popp.

Hat tip to Javi Gonzales for the pointer.

A Surfeit of Suitors, March 1983

The Calico Countess, May 1984

The Singular Miss Carrington, August 1984

Enchanting Stranger, October 1984

The Emerald Duchess, January 1985

Mad Masquerade, April 1985

The Dreadful Duke, November 1985

The Rake’s Protégée, 1985

The Turnabout Twins, May 1986

The Cloisonné Locket, November 1986

The Royal Snuff Box, March 1987

Lady Lochinvar, November 1987

The Queen Bee, August 1988

Belmont Books B60–2011, 1970. Cover artist: John Duillo.

Jack Slade was a house name at Belmont and the Lassiter westerns were written by various authors. Lynn Munroe makes an argument for Peter McCurtin as the author of Gunfight at Ringo Junction.

Judging from the swash glyphs – especially R and S – and the g with the upward-pointing ear, this isn’t Bookman Swash, but Photo-Lettering’s Bookman Italic Swash Heavy, see PLINC Bookman Swash.

Lesbian pulp novel published by Beacon in 1963. Written by Keith Ayling under the pseudonym Arthur Adlon.

The shameless story of Marcia Webster whose desperare loneliness led her beyond the bounds of permissible love…
Could she confince her love-making to men only?

According to pulpcovers.com, the cover art is by Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka (1913–2010). No typographer is credited. See also the Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection @ Mount Saint Vincent University.

Permanent Headline with its non-descending y in use on the cover of “a wildly erotic novel of intrigue, suspense, and adventure”, written by Basil Heatter (1918–2009). From the back cover:

There's a lot to be said for my Uncle Harry. Mostly unprintable. All my life I'd heard about him, and from a distance he was kind of a legend. But the moment I signed on as a one-man crew to his beat-up old bucket, Jezebel, I found my hero was really a pirate. Broads and booze kept him afloat between capers—and so far, his luck was holding …

But this new harebrained scheme—to heist the loot from an island gambling casino—was the daffiest—and most dangerous—yet.

And there I was. Right in the middle. Up to my virginal ears in naked nymphs and nitrous oxide—with nothing between me and the future but a leaky getaway and a pot of gold that was fast disappearing behind Harry’s private rainbow.

Cover art by Robert McGinnis. No typographer is credited.

This is soft-core mid-century erotica, originally published in 1961 under the title Las Vegas Lust, was updated for the 1970s. It's been speculated that Dean Hudson was none other than the novelist Evan Hunter a.k.a., Ed McBain.

This is the 1962 Permabooks edition of Evil Come, Evil Go by “Whit Masterson” – a pen name for the writing partnership of Robert Allison Wade and H. Bill Miller.

The cover features a large, cropped setting of Plain Gothic No. 6011, one of many sans-serif wood types offered by Hamilton Manufacturing Co. in the 20th century. Though there’s a possibility this was composed with photo-type adaptations of the original font, the tight-not-touching letterspacing matches a look common with large wood type, where the sidebearings of each piece of type are often cut as close to the letter as possible. I also enjoy the titling-friendly design of the comma, with a shortened descending stroke to allow for tight linespacing, and a height that matches the horizontal stroke of the ‘E’ beside it.

After spotting this book cover recently at Vintage Bookseller, I used it as an excuse to finally make a typeface page for Plain Gothic No. 6011 here at Fonts In Use.

The supporting type at the bottom and on the back is Alternate Gothic, with some small settings of what looks like Copperplate Gothic running along the spine.

La Femme infidèle is a novel by French writer Jules Roy (1907–2000), originally published by Gallimard in 1955. Shown here is Signet’s paperback edition of the English translation, published in 1957 as The Unfaithful Wife.

The cover art is by James Avati (1912–2005), a.k.a. the “Rembrandt of Paperback Book Covers”. See also The Paperback Art of James Avati (2005), authored by Kenneth Fulton and Piet Schreuders.

Two-colored Tacan and Cooper Black Italic with swash alternates in use for this paperback edition of Groupie.

From Dandy in Aspic:

This book, first published in 1969, quickly achieved cult status for more than one reason. Not only it was the first detailed insight into the groupie phenomenon and the world of sex, drugs and Rock n’ Roll, but it was also the first time the quintessential sixties slang was used in English literature. As Jonathon Green wrote in the preface to the 1997 edition: “Groupie” gets 22 citations in the Oxford English Dictionary from “downer” to “trippy” and “spliff” to “uptight”, a mini-lexicon of Sixties-speak (p. iv). The book itself is a fictionalised account of London’s sixties underground music scene by real-life groupie Jenny Fabian.

Bantam Books, 1970. Illustration by James Bama.