font sleuthing

June 4, 2005 11:55 AM

Could anyone identify the font used on this book cover? TIA!
posted by of strange foe to media & arts (12 comments total)

If you look closely, there are two similar but different fonts used on that book cover: one for the title and one for the author.

I tried Identifont but it didn't find a match.
posted by hattifattener at 12:14 PM on June 4, 2005

Hattifattener; it looks like the title is either set in all swash caps, or the author is set in small caps.

I'm looking through some books, will get back to you if I find anything. Did you try looking through the title pages of the book? Sometimes typefaces get listed in there.
posted by helvetica at 12:31 PM on June 4, 2005

If you can get a bigger image of the cover, I'd recommend trying WhatTheFont - it's an online font-identification tool that allows users to upload an image and the software figures out the font from there. It's been pretty reliable for me.
posted by Alex Handcoding at 1:01 PM on June 4, 2005

I second Alex's suggestion. I tried it with the image you linked to, but I think the text is too small and the compression too lossy to get a good result.
posted by greatgefilte at 1:04 PM on June 4, 2005

Well, I've had a good look but couldn't find anything exact. Monotype has a font called Gallia which is probably the closest thing out there. I wonder if the display type might have been done specifically for the cover design even though there are similar faces out there.
posted by helvetica at 1:10 PM on June 4, 2005

On closer inspection, Gallia is the style used for the author's line. So I would guess that there is a swash version of this font out there somewhere. The swashes might have never been digitized.
posted by helvetica at 1:15 PM on June 4, 2005

i took the image and used a sharpening filter before boosting the contrast, then sent the result to whatthefont (linked above). it didn't have a perfect match, but the best suggestions were Monotype Gallia and ATGalia. which is what other's have said.

if you want to try, image is here (in a minute, when i've uploaded it).
posted by andrew cooke at 1:42 PM on June 4, 2005

You'll note that this shows both swash and non-swash styles as being Monotype Gallia.
posted by basicchannel at 5:27 PM on June 4, 2005

Aaah... the "lowercase" class has the swash, it looks like.
posted by basicchannel at 5:32 PM on June 4, 2005

I just thought I'd mention the Typophile Type ID board, as they've helped me with some fonts in the past.
posted by patgas at 8:49 PM on June 4, 2005

basicchannel: just out of curiosity, how did you end up there from the Galia links on the Monotype site?
posted by helvetica at 9:31 AM on June 5, 2005

And I thought this would be like a shot in the dark! Thank you, you guys are wonderful!
posted by of strange foe at 11:14 AM on June 5, 2005