Ein Gruß von Caterina Valente / A Date with Caterina Valente album art

Ein Gruß von Caterina Valente (“A greeting from Caterina Valente”) is the debut album by French-Italian singer Caterina Valente. Released in Germany in 1955, it contains two of her greatest hits: “Ganz Paris träumt von der Liebe”, her cover version of Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris”, sold more than 900,000 copies in the first four years alone. The opening track “Andalucía (The Breeze and I)” went on to sell even more than one million copies.

The sleeve shows informal handwriting with two German specialties, a u with overbar (to distinguish it from the letter n) and an eszett (ß). The flare serif caps are from a typeface, Thannhaeuser-Schrift. First cast in 1929 by Schriftguss, it’s named after its designer, Herbert Thannhaeuser. Especially when used in capital letters, it can be regarded as a precursor to Optima (Hermann Zapf’s epitome of the serifless roman came out three years later, in 1958).

Still in 1955, the (uncredited) cover design was reused for an English-language album titled A Date With Caterina Valente. There’s little overlap between the two releases in terms of the included tracks. The new title is entirely set in Thannhaeuser-Schrift.

There’s also a Spanish-language version of the latter, issued for the Argentine market under the title Una Cita Con Caterina Valente. The sleeve designer for this variant apparently didn’t have access to the typeface, and rendered the new words by hand, loosely following the letterforms found in the artist’s name.

Caterina Valente died this week in Lugano, Switzerland, at the age of 93. Georg Seeßlen wrote an obituary for DIE ZEIT (in German), with a focus of her reception in Germany.