Inverted World by Christopher Priest (Faber, 1974)
Faber & Faber’s first edition of Christopher Priest’s science fiction novel Inverted World has a blue dust jacket with the author’s name and title typeset running sideways in Letraset’s Bombere in white, filling almost the whole front. On the front of the jacket the title also appears set in the top left with the usual horizontal baseline in Times New Roman Bold; the readability of Times has been compromised by printing in black-on-blue. The back jacket has exactly the same design, just with smaller type and without the black Times.
Bombere has a wireframe 3D effect which has a visual ambiguity similar to the Necker cube. A suitable match for the title, Inverted World.
The jacket spine uses Times New Roman Bold Italic in white for the title, and black for the author, but has been “embellished” by reprising the use of Bombere for initial I and W caps.
Underneath the jacket, the book’s spine typesets the title (in all caps) and author in a third typeface, apparently some version of Garamond.
The book was published in 1974, and having long been recognised as a landmark in British Science Fiction, was included in the SF Masterworks collection in 2010. [Wikipedia]
