Beyond and Back
A set of mini-lobby cards and the theatrical release poster (last image) for the “death-sploitation flick” Beyond and Back, a documentary about near-death experiences which was both poorly received by critics and commercially successful.
The lobby cards use (too) tightly set Open Kapitalen, a monumental caps-only design published by the venerable Enschedé foundry in 1929 and designed by Jan van Krimpen who most likely had book covers and title pages in mind for this design, certainly not morbid movies. In 2016, a digital version of Open Kapitalen was released by TEFF in an Outline and Fill version (there is no Solid version). A similar design to Open Kapitalen, and likely more widely available in the US in the 1970s, was Columna, with a slightly higher x-height, also no lowercase.
2 Comments on “Beyond and Back”
This sparked a memory and I just checked: James Mosley’s 1960 Motif review of Alphabet Thesaurus, the huge first Photo-Lettering specimen, complains that “the austere Open Capitals of the late Jan van Krimpen are inexplicably labelled 'Coronation Outline’”. I don’t have a copy handy to confirm, but I presume that’s where they come from.
Thanks, agreed! I can confirm that Photo-Lettering showed Van Krimpen’s design in their 1965 and 1971 catalogs, still under the name Coronation (Outline). In most other cases, PLINC stuck to the original names for their adaptations. My guess is that a generic name like “Open Capitals” was too mundane and unappealing for their taste.