Monday, September 12, 2022

Bugs Bunny in Neuland

It was garage sale day around here on Saturday and I couldn't help wandering around, checking things out. Since I'm in the part of life where I'm getting rid of things rather than acquiring them, I was very good. 

I did see this interesting book along the way:

I'm fascinated by the typeface on the cover: Neuland. It was designed by Rudolph Koch in 1923 in a German Expressionist vein, and since then has been largely coopted to signify primitiveness, particularly in African and African American cultural content, such as book covers. (I have a whole collection of book-cover photos where this typeface is used, most of them with topics related in some way to African or African-descended people.)

So seeing it on this Bugs Bunny book about the Klondike was out of the ordinary. The first edition of this book came out in 1947, which is pretty early for Neuland uses in English, so that may partially explain it: the cover designers hadn't gotten the memo yet. It was just an unusual, bold sans serif typeface to them.


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