Sunday, May 12, 2013

Fantasy Records swipes F&SF logo for earliest releases...then takes on GALAXY less actionably...


...or, why Kingsley Amis's comparison of the histories of jazz and sf was better than he gave himself credit for:


The popular science fiction magazine mentioned in Len Lyons notes was THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION and the first 78 RPM singles released by the new label used the exact logo type and design that the magazine used on its cover.



The magazine owners no doubt sent the Weisses a “Cease and Desist” letter and the now familiar Fantasy logo was introduced on subsequent pressings released by the new label as seen on the examples of Fantasy 504 and 505 above [as the full post appears at the Jazz Research blog].


When the Weiss brothers launched a second label in 1951 they borrowed the name from another science fiction magazine, GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, and came up with their own typeface to avoid any copyright problems like the one they encountered with Fantasy. (The author would like to thank reader Alan Parr for bringing this to his attention.)



1 comment:

Todd Mason said...

What I wrote in response to James Harrod's post, linked to and quoted above:

Excellent work, sir. Some evidence of how the Weiss Brothers' use of the Fantasy image as lifted from THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION's first logotype, when one of the magazine's two editors, Anthony Boucher, was based in San Francisco (Boucher also conducted an opera program on KPFK/Pacifica Radio in those years and many thereafter) was received by the publishers, Fantasy House/Mercury Press (then best known for publishing AMERICAN MERCURY and ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, and whose publisher, Lawrence Spivak, was just about to take on long-term duty as host of MEET THE PRESS on NBC) is hinted at in the correspondence published in THE EUREKA YEARS: BOUCHER AND MCCOMAS'S THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION 1949-1954, edited by Annette Peltz McComas and published by Bantam Books in 1982.