Federball by John le Carré (Büchergilde Gutenberg)

FF Prater Sans in (indirect) use in Joe Villion’s jacket design for the Büchergilde Gutenberg edition of Federball (“badminton”).

Orginally published under the title Agent Running in the Field in October 2019, it’s the final book by John le Carré. The British author of espionage novels (who previously worked for the Secret Service himself) died this week at the age of 89.

In her illustration, Villion translates the backdrop of the novel – “the sheer bloody lunacy of Brexit” – to a disintegrating Union Jack and a European Union flag in turmoil, with the U.S. stripes lurking from the sidelines. The letterforms of Prater Sans appear to be drawn manually, with some deviations from the typeface. This is probably most noticeable in the overall roundness and in particular glyphs like a or e – and in J, which has a bar like in FF Prater Serif.