Sweetcrab by Margaret Summerton (Doubleday)
Book jacket for the first U.S. edition of Sweetcrab by Margaret Summerton, published for the Crime Club by Doubleday & Company in 1971. The design is by Emanuel Schongut, with a watercolor illustration featuring the English mansion after which the book is named.
The letterforms used for the title go back to an untitled capital alphabet depicted in the second edition of Strong’s Book of Designs (1917). Emanuel doesn’t remember where the letters came from. He recounts: “I may have ordered them from a printer, type house after seeing them in a catalog or cobbled them together from an old 1930s type design book I have. […] [T]he illustration was the important thing to me, the lettering secondary. It had to fit the feeling of the illustration and composition.” Chances are we’re looking at Martin Caps, a phototype adaptation shown in a Lettergraphics catalog from 1968. By now, the design has been digitized more than once.
The author’s name is in L&C Hairline, designed by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase around 1965. The ultralight geometric sans came with a large number of alternates.
On the back flap, the jacket typography is credited to Cheryl Brown. The blurb and the author biography are set in Caledonia.
