Cover design proposals made by Clare Skeats for Quercus.
The ominous brush script is a slightly customized Brush 738, which is Bitstream’s generic name for Bison. This typeface was originally designed in 1938 by Julius Kirn for C.E. Weber. From 1923, the Stuttgart-based foundry had a joint venture with J.D. Trennert in Altona and shared designs with them. Trennert’s version of Bison is named Blizzard. There is also a digital Blizzard from URW++: sharp-edged, a tad lighter and most notably more tightly spaced than Brush 738.