LL Blankenhorn

[Stephen Coles]

Whenever I’m in Germany I’m struck by the prevalence of hand-lettered book covers. German publishers also seem particularly unafraid of omitting imagery from their covers, letting the title do all the selling of the book. This works especially well when the title is rendered by expressive lettering, and there are few examples as effective as Fritz Blankenhorn’s for Deutscher Bücherbund. On these covers, the text is the image.