Líbivé obrázky by Simone de Beauvoir (Odeon)
Les belles images is a novel by feminist philosopher and author Simone de Beauvoir, and deals with the problematization of social roles and stereotypical images of bourgeois women during the 1960. First published in French in 1966, this Czech paperback edition was issued by Odeon in Prague in 1969, with a cover designed by Lorenzo Taiuti.
The ornamented caps used for the author’s name have French roots. They are reproduced in the first volume of the Lettera series of alphabet source books published in Switzerland in 1954, as Initiales Ombrées, credited to Deberny & Peignot. Chances are that the Paris-based foundry inherited this typeface from one of their 19th-century predecessors.
German typesetting company Adolph Fürst & Sohn carried a phototype adaptation named Filetée, in which the horizontal hatching is removed. It’s listed in their 1969 catalog. Berthold Fototypes showed it as Egyptienne Filetée in their E1 catalog from 1974. This “filleted” version apparently found its way to Prague. Filetée is paired with stacked sans-serif capitals. These are hand-cut glyphs from Univers 83, or Black Extended, designed by Adrian Frutiger for the same company that previously carried the shaded initials – Deberny & Peignot.
Lorenzo Taiuti was born in Milan, Italy in 1943. In 1970, he was active as painter in Roudnice, Czechoslovakia. Later in his life, he taught courses on Mass Media and Art and Media at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Torino e Milano and the Facoltà di Architettura Roma. Taiuti died in 2020.
The original Initiales Ombrées (with horizontal hatching) in use for the title of an article in issue 67 (1939) of the French journal Arts et Métiers Graphiques.
The interior and the back cover are set in Monotype Baskerville.
4 Comments on “Líbivé obrázky by Simone de Beauvoir (Odeon)”
Mosley in his introduction to the Pouchée types describes a flat foot on the slab serif 'R’ as only found in French slab serifs. Jonathan Hoefler created a very similar internal shadow slab serif called Egiziano Filigree but the shadows aren’t as deep.
Thank you, Blythwood! Hoefler’s Egiziano Filigree was designed in 1989 for Rolling Stone magazine. A one-word sample is reproduced in Counterpunch – below is a photo from Estereográfica’s Portuguese edition. This face is wider, heavier, and without any bracketing – but yes, it’s definitely similar.
Vineta Ornament is another face in this ballpark. The all-caps style is part of the Vineta series deisgned by Ernst Völker for VGC in 1972.
Nice addition! What an amazingly apt typeface for advertising waffle irons.