Vender a Hitler by Robert Harris (Es Pop Ediciones)
Alarm for a scandal
This is the Spanish edition of a non-fiction book originally titled Selling Hitler by British journalist and novelist Robert Harris. The book is from 1986, but has remained intriguing and popular enough for a new Spanish translation. Harris meticulously documents a dramatic blunder of a German weekly, which paid millions for “the original diaries by Adolf Hitler” and published its discovery as a sensational scoop. The book’s subtitle: The Extraordinary Story of the Con Job of the Century. The scoop was soon discovered to be a nefarious swindle: the sixty vintage-looking booklets were in fact fabrications by a forger called Konrad Kujau.
The Spanish alternative publishing company Es Pop Ediciones published a new edition of the book’s translation in 2020. The book design is by the Pulpo Design studio, with whom Es Pop often works, and the cover is credited to Riki Blanco. As its main cover and headline font the designers chose Alarm, a heavy metal typeface designed by freelancer Heinz König and published in 1928 by foundry J.D. Trennert & Sohn in Hamburg-Altona. The typeface was then forgotten, but rediscovered in 2017 by Berlin type design initiative Fust & Friends, and carefully digitized by Andreas Seidel. Like the better-known Fanfare, a similar heavy metal display face from late 1920s Germany (which was actually used for an English version of the book), it oozes the atmosphere of pre-war German advertising without looking obsolete.
The author’s name on the cover and the spine uses Perpetua in all caps.
Inside the book, headlines in Alarm are paired with text set in Erato by Dieter Hofrichter.
The title page demonstrates that, unlike “true” blackletter typefaces, Alarm works well for all-caps settings, too. The author’s name is set in Perpetua Bold, and the dollar sign in the illustration is taken from Cassanett Outline. Last but not least, “Es Pop Ensayo” features Cheap Pine Sans.
3 Comments on “Vender a Hitler by Robert Harris (Es Pop Ediciones)”
The cover also nicely echoes the eagle logo of 1930s-era German Adler typewriters:
In the combination with the typewriter, this association surely is evident. I’d like to add that the Adler company had used an eagle as their brand symbol long before the Nazi era. It was established in 1896 and manufactured typewriters from 1909 on. The stylized eagle on the book cover is directly patterned after the Parteiadler, i.e. the emblem of the Nazi Party, which is distinguished from the Reichsadler (the emblem of the Deutsches Reich) and the one by the typewriter manufacturer by looking to the right from the viewer’s point of view.
As I wrote, it merely echoes the brand symbol.