Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Greatest Hits album art
Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Greatest Hits, recorded by various orchestras and released by RCA Red Seal Records in 1972.
The bottom-heavy title typeface is PLINC’s Village which was first shown in their Psychedelitypes catalog from 1968. The letterforms are spiced up with a swirling pattern fill, a special effect technique that was named “Psychemat”. Various treatments were showcased in the same booklet, see the image below. The one used for the album cover, psm-5, is demo’d with the very same typeface, and almost the same color.
The cover illustration is by Gerry Gersten (1927–2017). The Cooper Union alumni (1950) gained “international acclaim as a caricaturist, drawing hundreds of illustrations for The New York Times, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek, Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone and MAD.” [obituary]
Spread from Photo-Lettering’s Psychedelitypes catalog with a demonstration of various “Psychemats”.
4 Comments on “Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Greatest Hits album art”
There is a digitization of Village and Orbit named Village by Humberto Gillan of OutsideInside Fonts: https://www.fontspace.com/outsideinside-fonts/village
Thank you, Jay. I have added this info to the typeface page. It’s nice to have some digital version of this style, and don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Still, I wish that the digital incarnation of Photo-Lettering by House Industries would do a proper official version.
Village and Orbit are two distinct typefaces. At Fonts In Use, we have lumped them together in one entry as they are very similar, to the point it’s hard to tell them apart in a Use featuring only a few (small) letters. Apart from the distinct shapes for R and T, Village is distinguished by flared strokes – most outlines are slightly concave, giving the letterforms an animated feel. Humberto didn’t reproduce this feature in his digitization, see the comparison below. Top: PLINC Village Narrow (1968). Bottom: digital Village by OutsideInside (2017).
For the sake of completeness, there’s also a freebie digitization of Orbit, made in 3 styles (solid, expanded, shaded) by Character in 1998, but it’s of poor quality, with autotraced outlines.
Flor, there might be another digitization Dick Pape made in 2010—it is called DXS Orbit.
Full glyph set / Source: Luc Devroye
Thanks, Jay! Yes, Pape made a lot of digitizations based on the showings in Dan X. Solo’s books (hence the DXS prefix). They are autotraced – which shows in the rough contours – and the glyphs are not centered in their bounding box, leading to less-than-optimal spacing (some of which is patched by kerning). Also, the character set is limited to what was included in the books, i.e. barely more than A–Z and 0–9. It’s free and will be of service to some users, but I stand by what I wrote above.