Cornell Woolrich paperback series (Alianza Editorial)
Part 1, Las garras de la noche (The Claws of Night), 1986, featuring “Graves for the Living”, “The Red Tide”, “The Corpse Next Door”, and “You’ll Never See Me Again”
Covers of a Spanish paperback series with stories by American author Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968), written under the pseudonym William Irish between 1935 and 1947. The collection of pulp fiction mysteries was first published by Harper & Row in 1971 in a single volume titled Nightwebs, selected by Francis M. Nevins. Alianza Editorial gave each of the four sections a separate volume. María Ángeles Aledo provided the translation.
Designer Daniel Gil illustrated the recurring theme of death with uncanny assemblages of found objects, often including anatomical elements (see also his cover for La comunicación no verbal from 1976). For La muerte y la ciudad, for instance, he used a photo of a human skull with the top removed, revealing seven rounds of ammunition.
The typeface is Compton, a bold stand-alone italic designed by Alan Meeks at Letraset and released in 1985. With its returning construction and the pronounced thick-thin contrast, it’s reminiscent of Atlántida (1930s?), a shaded cursive by the Gans foundry from Madrid, or Karl Erik Forsberg’s Lunda (1941). The capitals are also similar to those of Imre Reiner’s Corvinus Italic (1934/1935), while the ball terminals in the lowercase have a precursor in Hans Bohn’s Allegro (1936). There is no official digitization of Compton. Castcraft made a version named OPTI Caliber.
Part 2, La muerte y la ciudad (Death and the City), 1986, featuring “Dusk to Dawn”, “Murder at the Automat”, “Death in the Air”, and “Mamie ’n’ Me”
Part 3, Los sanguinarios y los atrapados (The Butchers and the Trapped), 1986, featuring “The Screaming Laugh”, “One and a Half Murders”, “Dead on Her Feet”, and “One Night in Barcelona”
Part 4, En el crepúsculo (In the Twilight), 1987, featuring “The Penny-a-Worder”, “The Number’s up”, “Too Nice a Day to Die”, and “Life Is Weird Sometimes”
