I've heard it said by more than one person that Alfred Lawson's books can be spotted from fifty feet away by the distinctive all-upper-case sans-serif bold font used for all his cover titles. Case in point:
[In this example, the author credit lettering uses a different font than the title itself.]
I've tried to identify these using some online tools, but none resulted in a perfect match. The title font above is very close to a variant of Futura Extra Bold. See commercial example at:
It has a very 1930s feel to it, which is probably not a coincidence. Futura was designed in 1927 by Paul Renner using simple geometric shapes, inspired by the Bauhaus style. Futura Extra Bold, however, was not released until the 1950s, so Lawson's Humanity Publishing Company was using something else. Actually, I see where Humanity Publishing used at least three different fonts for cover titles and inside title pages, all geometric sans-serif.
Like so much else about A. W. Lawson's writings, it turns out that his preferred fonts have a contextual link to the times he lived in.
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