Maureen McGovern – “The Morning After” / “Midnight Storm” Dutch single cover
Contributed by Jan Middendorp on May 31st, 2020. Artwork published in
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Scanned by Jan Middendorp. License: All Rights Reserved.
It surely spirals.
Browsing my hundreds of 45s, I came across this intriguing typeface on the cover of a (then) famous song from the 1972 disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure. Mr. Hardwig found the font, registered on this site as #46684, but this is its first use that has come to light! The font must have been brand new when this sleeve’s designer chose it. Designed by François Dussenty, winner of a competition organised by Mecanorma, the French Letraset competitor. Spiral was released in 1972 as a Mecanorma dry transfer sheet font. The brand was very popular in the Netherlands, home of the Philips label — so perhaps this design was made there, at Philips’ well-equipped graphic design department in Eindhoven.
1 Comment on “Maureen McGovern – “The Morning After” / “Midnight Storm” Dutch single cover”
Thank you for this contribution, Jan! What a dizzying reading experience … Spiral is one of those faces that can be characterized as “fontified lettering”. Taking inspiration from licorice wheels can be great for a one-off piece of lettering, but it rarely pays off to turn such an extreme idea into a font, applying it to the full alphabet.
Case in point: This is only the second time ever that I’ve seen Spiral in use. Even better that this Use is such a successful one. The unknown designer applied great care, making sure that the strokes in the two vertical mt pairs properly line up, and also showed inventiveness, using a period (?) from the lowercase-only Spiral for the smaller c in “McGovern”.
Three years ago, when Stephen posted an image with 23 Mecanorma Contest Winners including Spiral, we had a mere 11 Uses for these faces documented on Fonts In Use. Today, thanks to contributions by Garrison, Robert and others including you, this number stands at 63 – thanks a lot!
Talking about numbers: You mention that Spiral is #46684 on Fonts In Use. This is more of a database ID than a count. But indeed we have catalogued a lot of typefaces (typeface families), and we’re adding more – both new and old – on almost a daily basis. At the moment, the count is just short of 50,000, with more than 6,300 that have Uses assigned to them. Two years ago, when we crossed the mark of 10K Uses, the latter number was at 4,289. With this record sleeve, you further raised it – cheers!