Feuersprünge by Elwyn Chamberlain
Gates of Fire is a novel by artist, film maker and author Elwyn Chamberlain (1927–2014), originally published by Grove Press in 1978. Shown here is the cover of Heyne’s German paperback edition, translated by Ingeborg F. Meier. I haven’t read this free library find, nor does the cheesy blurb (“Laura’s spiritual and sensual adventures in the land of the gurus”) tempt me to do so.
The cover typography is outstanding, though. The main typeface is ITC Serif Gothic Heavy, with its alternate form for E, and customized glyphs for F, S, and P (the latter being made from a D). The designers of Atelier Heinrichs & Schütz arranged the letterforms on a bouncing baseline, echoing the German title (literally “Jumps of fire”), with the U and Ü in the center of the two lines aligned to each other.
The secondary typeface is the rarely seen Poppl College, or, more precisely, the Bold weight of College 2, which is distinguished from College 1 by swashy caps. It was released by Berthold Fototype in 1981.
Its design – a monolinear italic with rounded terminals – and also the family structure with a second set of caps remind me of Loreley & Loretta. This double family came out a few years earlier, in 1977 (Loreley) and 1979 (Loretta): Georg Salden designed it for the exclusive use by members of the GST-Kreis, a group of phototypesetting studios.
Did Berthold commission College from Friedrich Poppl as a follower of Loreley & Loretta, so that they could offer something similar to their customers as well? Berthold and Salden weren’t on best terms after the Berlin type company messed up the production of Daphne in 1970. Salden later quoted the experience as one of the reasons why he decided to publish his fonts independently.
On the MyFonts page, Monotype (who since 2022 claim the rights to the Berthold library) state that “Poppl College was designed by Friedrich Poppl for Berthold in 1974.” However, period sources like Berthold’s 1982 and 1985 catalogs give a 1981 date. Berthold’s 1988 trademark filing likewise states that Poppl-College was first used in 1981.
A comparison of Loreley with Loreley leicht (top) and Poppl College 2 Bold and Regular (bottom)
Whatever Berthold’s commercial motives were, Poppl’s design is a distinct one and different from Salden’s in several aspects, from the overall narrower and more formal shapes to the round instead of angled entry and exit strokes. In many regards, College is a low-contrast derivative of Poppl-Exquisit from 1970, see a comparison on Identifont.
