Types

Probably about fifty percent of book covers use the standard Linotype Bengali typeface, while another third use one or another of the locally available fonts, generally pretty poor quality. I didn’t see any typefaces from outside Bangladesh, such as Adobe Bengali, Nirmala, Noto Sans, or ITF’s Bengali typefaces.

There were a number of historical revival display typefaces, most with a feeling of ornament being arbitrarily tacked on and unrealistic calligraphic strokes.

Others tried to reproduce the feel of letterpress types from a previous era:

Lettering

The hand-lettered titles mostly had either an extremely blocky feel to the point of being illegible or else excessive curls, which is something you see a lot in contemporary commercial graphics in Dhaka.

Calligraphic

A lot of the calligraphic titles looked to be done with a square-tipped marker, and a few were quite well-proportioned and interesting.

Much of the calligraphy however has awkward letter-forms and an inconsistency of style and stroke:

The norm for Bangladeshi calligraphy has been to redraw the calligraphy as a vector shape, and then give it a slightly offset shadow. While this gives a decisive line, it loses the beauty of the hand-drawn calligraphy. Oftentimes the “vectorized” calligraphy is simply drawn as an weighted stroke (perhaps with Illustrator’s ‘calligraphy brush’), further reducing the expression of the calligraphy:

Many of the calligraphic titles were so poorly done that it would have been better to have used the standard Linotype Bengali text face:

As always, the late Qayyum Choudhury’s distinctive calligraphy outshines all the others in maturity and originality of style:

There were a few other unique and interesting finds out there: