Tom O’Bedlam by Robert Silverberg

In my previous post, I showed how Loretta Trezzo customized Cortez for a book by Robert Silverberg published in 1983. Two years later, the New York-based designer worked on a related job, the dust jacket for Silverberg’s post-apocalyptic novel Tom O’Bedlam.

This book was issued by a different publisher, Donald I. Fine, not Arbor House. Still, Trezzo used the same basic layout, with an illustration in the lower half against a gradient background, and a type treatment that again shows the author’s name and the title in big white letters, complete with the hyper-extended glyphs for R and t, set center-aligned, and separated by a smaller line in Helvetica Condensed.

This time, though, she opted for “Cortez Sans”. Letraset’s Cortez came in a single style; there was no sans-serif variant. The jacket designer made this modification herself, by chopping off the “Latin” triangular serifs. That’s pretty much the same technique used in the 19th century to produce some of the earliest sans-serif typefaces, see figure 25 in Pierre Pané-Farré’s article for Forgotten Shapes. Consequently, the result looks equally wonky, especially for glyphs like S and e.

I wonder if this was Trezzo’s own idea, or whether it was a request by the publisher (“nice, but can you make it sans?”). Maybe the inspiration came from the design of the interior – the title page (shown at the end of this post) features ITC Grizzly, which is a sans of similar weight and geometric build, with forms for R, S, a and, most strikingly, g that are akin to the custom “Cortez Sans”. Or was it the other way around, and the (uncredited) interior designer tried to approximate the jacket typography?