The Time Machine / The Island of Dr. Moreau / The Invisible Man / The First Men in the Moon / The Food of the Gods / In the Days of the Comet / The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (Heinemann/Octopus)
Half-title
This collection of science-fiction stories by H.G. Wells (1866–1946) was first published as Seven Famous Novels in 1934. This edition by Heinemann/Octopus from 1977 has no explicit title. Cover and spine only mention the author’s name, and the full-title lists the names of the included novels; The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon, The Food of the Gods, In the Days of the Comet, and The War of the Worlds. It uses Koloss for the cover, spine, endpapers, titles, and contents.
The cover and spine are debossed and printed with a gold-coloured metallic ink on a dark red hardcover. The endpapers use a shift-and-repeat design, with the shift chosen so that the left-hand slopes of the W on successive lines all line up.
The half-title, again featuring only the text “H.G.WELLS” uses an expanding crop-and-repeat design. The same design idea is used on the full title and the contents page, which share a similar design except for minor details such as the publisher’s imprint on the title, and the text “CONTENTS” and page numbers on the contents page.
I assume the book came with a jacket, but sadly I do not have it.
Front cover
Endpapers
Full-title
Contents page
Spine
3 Comments on “The Time Machine / The Island of Dr. Moreau / The Invisible Man / The First Men in the Moon / The Food of the Gods / In the Days of the Comet / The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (Heinemann/Octopus)”
Very cool!
I recently came across a setting that’s very similar to the title pages in The World-Famous Photo Typositor Alphabet Library, a catalog issued by the Visual Graphics Corporation in 1973. It’s included as a demonstration for the typographic possibilities offered by their Photo Typositor. I don’t know if it was an existing real-world design, or just an example made for the catalog. The caption reads:
Who knows, maybe that example provided the inspiration for the book design?
Here’s a related “explosion” setting made with digital means (and a 1970s VGC typeface), for Higamos Hogamos from 2009. Not exactly crop-and-repeat, rather enlarge-and-repeat.
I believe this is from a series of anthologies published by Heinemann/Octopus/Secker & Warburg around the end of the 1970s, each collecting the major works of one author. They’re very common and you see them regularly second-hand. I have a copy of the George Orwell edition handy, and it’s not as interesting on the endpapers-it’s simply the author’s name repeated. (It’s printed in the USA and has no design credit.)
Here’s some pictures from an eBay seller.