David Goodis book series, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Nightfall, 1947 (1991). Photo by Ken Shung.
In the early 1990s, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard reissued a series of books by David Goodis (1917–1967). The crime novels in the noir fiction genre were originally published in the 1940s and 1950s.
For the paperback covers, Keith Sheridan Associates applied the same design recipe as for their reissues of books by Jim Thompson: monochrome photographed crossed by colored stripes that resemble police tape. These bands present title and author name in an expanded typeface. This time it’s not Latin Wide, but Filmotype Fox. This grot came out in 1953, around the time when Goodis wrote the novels. As with the Jim Thompson series, the first name is in all lowercase letters and the rest in all caps. The blurbs are again added in Helvetica breit fett.
Street of No Return, 1954 (1991). Photo by Barnaby Hall.
Black Friday, 1954 (1990)
Shoot the Piano Player a.k.a. Down There, 1956 (1990). Photo by Ken Shung.
Nightfall, 1953 (1991)
4 Comments on “David Goodis book series, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard”
That looks more like Filmotype Fox (or a similar typeface.)
This is Filmotype Fox.
Of course! Thanks for the catch, Bryson and Quinn. Fixed.
There are more such striped covers for reissues by Black Lizard. For each author, Keith Sheridan Associates picked a different typeface. I don’t find all of them as convincing as Fox for David Goodis and Latin Wide for Jim Thompson. Optima is used for Fredric Brown and Times Bold for Charles Williams, both times with seriously stretched letterforms. Charles Willeford got Futura Extra Bold Italic, and Richard Neely Eurostile Bold Extended.