Stan Rubin and His Tigertown Five album art
Stan Rubin and his Tigertown Five was a dixieland jazz band that formed in 1952 at Princeton University. This cover for their 1956 self-titled album was designed by the prolific jazz album designer, Burt Goldblatt.
The front of the cover features scribbly tiger illustrations on top of a relatively rare appearance of the Röntgen Therapie alphabet from Walter Käch’s 1949 lettering sample book, Schriften / Lettering / Écritures. The alphabet wasn’t produced as type for mechanical composition until more recent adaptations, but – like many other alphabets from Käch’s book and others like it – the letters were sometimes copied and pasted up manually for limited applications like this. Käch’s alphabets also served as a spiritual predecessor to the Univers type family: Adrian Frutiger was Käch’s student and incorporated many similar traits into his now-ubiquitous design. Supporting text on the cover is set in Century Expanded Italic with the design credit set in some small, wide sans-serif.
Goldblatt’s adoption of Kach’s alphabet seems somewhat unusual, since Käch’s book – published in Switzerland and still relatively new at the time – was likely much less common on the American side of the Atlantic. But this also wasn’t the last time Goldblatt would make prominent use of Käch’s alphabets.
The back of the album cover, on the other hand, is much more typical for workaday mid-1950s American typography, with a fairly plain and colorless composition set in Tempo and a dash of Ludlow Bodoni Italic.
