Lots of all-caps ITC Korinna in two of its weights, for the cover of Bantam-Seal’s 1981 paperback edition of And No Birds Sang. From Wikipedia:

And No Birds Sang (published in 1979, revised in 2012) is Canadian author Farley Mowat’s autobiographical account of his military service as a junior Canadian infantry officer in the United Kingdom and Italy during World War II. The book describes Mowat’s transformation from a young man hoping to share the perceived glory of his father’s generation’s victory in The Great War to a combat veteran struggling to cope with the seemingly unending loss of his friends.

The cover art is by Paul Lehr

Le Gers durant la seconde Guerre Mondiale (“Gers during World War II”) is a book produced for the Gers Departmental Archives. This book recreates the atmosphere of a tragic era, as well as the hardships and hopes of ordinary men and women in one of France’s most isolated regions. The texts were written by Karine Aparico.

Art Handling in Oblivion assembles five art collections that have been stolen during key historical events, either by regimes or organised individuals. Seizure of art is one of most hidden and underestimated objectives of war. Behind conquering campaigns lurk hidden stories of deprived cultural heritage and devastation of the enemy's cultural identity. Some of the discussed collections have been found and restituted, others are still in hostile possession or missing.

The book is published as Volume 1 (#501) of the paperback series fink twice by edition fink, originally presented by Rob van Leijsen as his Master thesis for the Spaces & Communication course at HEAD – Genève in 2012.

Art Handling in Oblivion was awarded as one of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books of the year 2014 and received a honorary appreciation at the Best Book Design from all over the World competition in Leipzig in February 2015.

Album cover for the soundtrack by Ernest Gold, composer of Exodus [More info on Discogs]

Judgment at Nuremberg depicts a fictionalized version of the Judges’ Trial of 1947, one of the twelve Nuremberg Military Tribunals conducted under the auspices of the U.S. military in the aftermath of World War II. Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film about the trial of 16 Nazi jurists and lawyers is based on a courtroom drama written by Abby Mann. It featured some of the best actors working in Hollywood at the time, including Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Werner Klemperer, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, William Shatner, Montgomery Clift, and an Oscar winning performance by Maximilian Schell. The film won three Academy Awards in total and was nominated in nine more categories.

Both the theatrical release posters and the cover of Ernest Gold’s soundtrack feature the compressed Inserat-Grotesk as the primary typeface.

One Sheet (27″×41″) poster

Six Sheet (79″×80″) poster

Reminder that there’s no fascism without warmongering, and that war inevitably comes with injury to life and limb.

This Verbandpäckchen Nr. 1313 Größe III (“Bandage pack No. 1313 Size III”) of the German Wehrmacht has text set in two weights from Element. The simplified Gotisch was issued by the Bauer foundry in 1933–1934 as one of the first typefaces in the modernized blackletter subgenre that coincided with the early years of the Nazi regime. The notice about the package being “keimfrei, luft-, staub-, wasserdicht” (“sterile, airtight, dust- and waterproof) is set in a less commonly seen lighter weight. Number and size info are in a bold Bodoni.

The bandages were produced by the Verbandstoff- und pharmazeutische Fabrik Ulm-Frankfurt a. M., G. m. b. H. in Ulm-Donau. The shown item was part of remaining stocks of the U.S. Army, from the estate of Cpl. Erich Wick, Army Medical Corps, German Labor Service, 1950.

First US edition of A Vision of Battlements. Anthony Burgess based his first novel on his experiences during World War II in Gibraltar, where he was serving with the British army. Written in 1949, it wasn’t published until 1965, following the success of A Clockwork Orange.

Jacket designer Larry Lurin had the title set on a curve, in two lines of all-caps Marble Heart. The shaded design dates back to the mid-1800s; ATF reissued it in 1933. Its quaint allure goes together well with the illustration depicting a saluting soldier as the inverted pendulum in a mechanical metronome.

Together with scenographer Patrick Keller, Atelier bora-bord conceived the design of 1939–1945. Paroles de Sélestadiens, an exhibition commissioned by the French city of Sélestat and shown in February 2025 at Arsenal Sainte-Barbe. From the studio’s website (translated):

An exhibition based on the rich and dense archives preserved in the collection of the Humanist Library of Sélestat. The graphic supports use metal file fasteners and binder clips to hang directly onto the grids, without masking artifices, highlighting the world of archivists. A colored background unifies each of the five different sections of the exhibition. The Trabis typeface is used to compose all the texts in a single weight, giving a consistent tone to this extensive body of work. Large hanging banners – kakemonos – share testimonials from elders, rekindling the emotional memories of events that happened 80 years ago.

A booklet that takes the reader on a journey into the past and collects the traces of the Jewish citizens deported from Wangen in 1940. This book Wangen am See – September und Oktober 1940 was produced for the Freundeskreis Jakob Picard by the author Anne Overlack.

A 1945 pamphlet circulated within the U.S. Army to help serving soldiers understand the fascism that they were fighting, and how to recognise fascism.

This one is #64 of the “Army Talk” series issued by the War Department’s Army Orientation Branch, a unit of the Information and Education Division.

“Army Talk” is in Poster Bodoni Compressed, reversed, and “Orientation Fact Sheet” in letterspaced caps from Franklin Gothic, with the number 64 added from its Extra Condensed width. “FASCISM” looks a lot like Linotype’s Poster Bodoni. In fact, it’s Ludlow’s Bodoni Black: this design is distinguished by the forward-leaning S and the short lower part of C, among other things. A headline on page 6 of the pamphlet has the letter i with tilted dot – another characteristic feature of Bodoni Black. The text typeface is Linotype Bodoni.

Copies of the leaflet are available on the Internet Archive.

Hilma Wolitzer’s young adult novel was first published in hardback by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1975. This is the cover of the mass-market paperback issued as Dell 94112 in March 1978, featuring Patrick Collins’s Rodin for the title. The cover artist is unknown.

From the back cover:

Detail

As an Armenian resistance fighter during World War II, Missak Manouchian received France’s highest honor when entering the Panthéon in Paris in February 2024, on the 80th anniversary of his execution, accompanied by his wife Mélinée Manouchian. This ceremony was also a commemoration of the 23 foreign resistants of the Francs-tireurs et partisans – main-d’œuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI) who sacrificed their lives for freedom.

The public commission Infini has been chosen and cast in bronze to compose its symbolic inscription in the Panthéon.

Writer Jonathan Littell finished writing his book on distorted and fragmented memories about the Babi Yar massacre and Ukrainian nationalists in World War II two days prior to Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine. It became impossible to publish this text the way it was at the moment — not least because Putin’s propaganda started using these nationalists as one of the arguments to justify the actions of the Russian government.

In May 2022, Littell teamed up with Antoine d’Agata, a member of Magnum Photos agency, and travelled to Ukraine where he wrote a series of news stories. In November of the same year, he got back to his text and placed the events described in it into the context of the ongoing war.

The book, originally written in French, was published in Russian by Meduza in June 2024, under the title Неудобное место.

A purely typographic sleeve for a spoken word single by New York City radio DJ Scott Muni (1930–2004).

[More info on Discogs]

Graphic design direction of Rimbombo, a semester project realized by the Visual Communication students of the Faculty of Design and Arts Bozen-Bolzano, in collaboration with the Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino. Rimbombo is a photographic exhibition about the 1944 Anglo-American bombing of the city of Trento.

The campaign is set in Right Grotesk Mono by Alex Slobzheninov, available from Pangram Pangram Foundry.

Gill Kayo was originally drawn by Eric Gill in 1932 and issued by Monotype in 1936. In 1980, a condensed variant of the heavyweight was added by the Letraset studio in 1980. In 1981, Herbert Carl Traue used Gill Kayo Condensed for the jacket of Verrat in Rot (“Treason in red”), and contrasted it with the family’s Light weight.

Rudolf Ströbinger’s novel is based on historical events that took place in Brno in 1945: in the final phase of the Second World War, cousins Alois Bauer and Vladimír Blažka carried out an assassination attempt on SS-Hauptsturmführer August Gölzer, a representative of the German protectorate in occupied Czechoslovakia. The title of the book refers to the fact that the two communist resistance fighters were denounced by one of their comrades, who revealed their names to the Gestapo under duress.

Às vezes dá vontade de chorar feito criança – Os diários de guerra 1943–1945 (“Sometimes you want to cry like a child – The war diaries 1943-1945”) is a facsimile edition of Heinrich Böll’s war diaries that expose the anguish of the German writer in the trenches and hospitals of the Second World War.

This edition reproduces in its original size the three notebooks left by the future writer, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, and below them the transcripts of his nervous handwriting. The graphic design of Laura Lotufo uses several visual resources to assemble a network of information that clarify or complement the original notes, through excerpts of letters, technical data, and, future works by Böll and Army reports.

Most headlines use Agena Display. Texts are set in Tiempos, while Ofelia Text is used for transcripts of the diaries. Marginal notes and other small texts use Elza and Elza Narrow.

Egyptienne Condensed Bold in all caps, stacked and justified, for Ballantine Books Original U5046. Published in 1966, this paperback is a reprint of the 1960 original of A Torch to the Enemy, a non-fiction book by Martin Caidin (1927–1997), with “the shattering story of U.S. air power and the fire raids that destroyed Japan”. Cover art by Ed Valigursky?

[More info on ISFDB]

Poland. Key to Europe, featuring Peignot gras dramatically staged with shadow effect and a sloping baseline

Two books written by Raymond Leslie Buell and published by Alfred A. Knopf, both with Peignot used for the title.

Buell (1896–1946) was an American social scientist who at the time served as president of the Foreign Policy Association. In Poland. Key to Europe, he points out the importance of Poland maintaining its independence and thus saving Europe “from the domination of either Fascism or Communism”. It was published in April 1939 – a few months before Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and soon after attacked Poland. Isolated America followed in May 1940, when German troops invaded France and the Low Countries. In this book, Buell expressed his stance against U.S. isolationism. One and a half years later, the United States abandoned its neutrality and entered World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Peignot was pretty new in 1939. A.M. Cassandre’s groundbreaking design with the novel mix of capital and minuscule forms was first released by Deberny & Peignot in 1937. The bold weight, Peignot gras, followed in 1938. On the jacket for the first book, it’s paired with Egmont and Ariston. “Key to Europe” is handlettering. It appears to mimick Ariston (see the spine panel) – or is it the other way around? The text on the inner flap is set in Monotype Bodoni.

The bold geometric sans on the second book jacket is Vogue, used with some of its alternate glyphs. The author’s name is lettered, again not too far removed from Ariston.

Second edition jacket of Isolated America with a blurb by William Allen White

Movie tie-in edition of Willi Heinrich’s 1955 WWII novel Das geduldige Fleisch (The Willing Flesh), which in 1977 was adapted for the screen. Titled Cross of Iron (German: Steiner – Das Eiserne Kreuz), the (anti-)war film was directed by Sam Peckinpah, featuring James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason, and David Warner. Quentin Tarantino cited it as inspiration for Inglourious Basterds.

The uncredited cover designer relied on Constantin Filmverleih’s martial footage. The typography uses Schwere Block (1920), the heaviest member of Berthold’s Block series, characterized by minimal extenders. On the jacket’s spine, the title is shown in the horizontally more economic Enge Block. Schwer and Eng were among the five styles from the family that Berthold offered in their phototype range. Block is contrasted with a light weight from Gill Sans.

The Unknown Soldier is a German documentary film about the Wehrmachtsausstellung. The editors of New York made it a Critic's Pick and wrote:

Veteran director Michael Verhoeven’s gripping documentary starts with a look at his countrymen’s response to a German exhibit detailing crimes committed by Wehrmacht soldiers during World War II, and then goes on to show how much collective collaboration and organization were required to realize the Nazis’ nihilistic vision. The director does get distracted at times, but as a bitter portrait of how ordinary people commit extraordinary crimes, this is one of the more disturbing Holocaust documentaries of recent vintage.

[More info on IMDb]

The display typeface is Matrix Inline. Derived from the Extra Bold weight of Matrix, this member of Zuzana Licko’s Latin is distinguished by partly open letterforms. It also has decorative diamonds inside the counters of O and Q. For “Der unbekannte” and the subtitle (“What have you done during the war, father?”), it’s paired with caps from DIN Neuzeit Grotesk, the 1970 adaptation of Neuzeit-Grotesk by the German Institute for Standardization.

The director’s credit uses a better known DIN: it’s FF DIN, Albert-Jan Pool’s improvement over DIN 1451. They are shown a bit too small here to be appreciated, but the remaining credits are set in another typeface design by Licko: it’s Senator.

Michael Verhoeven died this week at the age of 85. RIP.

The final letter in “SOLDAT” is custom made. For comparison, the glyphs for T, dagger (†), and double dagger (‡) as included in Matrix II Inline Extra Bold.