I have shown this collec­tion previ­ously. But this time, I was able to show it with better detail. It was the 1980 souvenir book of 24 pages describing the Nutcracker story and its history.

1980 Nutcracker Program Cover 

Posters on the inside covers 

After these 44 years I discov­ered the credits listed in the last column on the last page, naming the full list of artists. Well, almost full: For poster #16, I was listed while I was free-lancing at Corpo­rate Graphics in the early ​‘70s, but photog­ra­pher Larry Keenan Jr. was the creator as he used a filter on his camera when shooting the photo of the ​“dancing doll”. Larry Keenan. Jr. was known for his ​“reporting style” of photog­raphy. (See his link at the column at the right.)

As I was sketching thumb-nail ideas for the up-coming San Fran­cisco Ballet’s holiday poster for the ​“Nutcracker”, Larry visited the studio and offered to try some exper­i­men­ta­tion, using and existing photo from the ballet’s collec­tion. On his return, days later, Larry said that he tried a series of filters and achieved this ​”Holiday Orna­ment” look, trans­formed from the orig­inal image. He had worked without any direc­tion. We and the client accepted this effect, exactly as he presented it. The image was used for full-sized posters, small poster and direct mail which offered ticket prices and perfor­mance times – all items were printed at Pisani Carlisle Graphics.

I worked with Larry with the type design, but Larry should also have been cred­ited under Posters: Design and Art/Photography.

The poster #1, I created while I free­lanced at Vicom Asso­ciates, but I was also was working inde­pen­dently with the ballet company and creating other graphic assign­ments for them.

I show the cover of this 1980 program and I real­ized (only yesterday) that a miss-spelled word can be missed by many before a job is printed and also 44 years later. Yesterday, I looked at the type on the cover and the inside title page with this unusual script lettering.

Unless this script style type, unusual as it is, has a very strange letter:”k” it missed the ques­tioning of hundreds of readers. We read, what we think we see.

Ann Thompson