Letters & Crime Making Pulp Paperbacks in the Digital Era — Max Phillips
Channel: TypeCon
Date: 2022-06-30

Recorded during TypeCon2015: Condensed in Denver, Colorado

The old paperback original crime novels were written fast and sold cheap from a revolving wire rack. They were designed fast, too, largely by anonymous in-house art directors, and helped create a new typographic vernacular based on speed, intensity, a small number of vaguely modernist metal typefaces, and an array of lettering styles that were eye-catching but not too technically demanding.

Twelve years ago mystery writer Charles Ardai and I started a new imprint we hoped would revive the tradition of the cheap, lurid PBO. It would publish both lost gems from the old pulp era and new work written in the spirit of the old, all in covers done in the grand noir manner. The name we settled on was Hard Case Crime.

This presentation will discuss the mix of B movie and Bauhaus influences that shaped hard-boiled typography and lettering, and the typefaces it relied on. I’ll attempt a taxonomy of the major genres of cover lettering, including Psycho Jazzy, Urgent Stencil, and Horroresque. Lastly, I’ll show a selection of Hard Case’s own books and discuss the cultural and commercial pressures that shaped our designs as we adapted a mid-Century print genre to the digital age.