Edward Johnston's sans from 1916
Eric Gill's sans from 1928-30
W.A. Dwiggins' Metro from 1929
Paul Renner's Futura from 1928

Letterhead fonts has a few cool ones...Chesham for one..

http://www.letterheadfonts.com/fonts/cheshamsans.php

Awesome, thanks so much.
If anyone else has suggestions, I'd love to hear more.

Richmond

Franklin Gothic
Akzidenz Grotesk

This being said, there was not much "packaging" at this time.

dr

Johnston’s and Gill’s faces wouldn’t have been on packaging in the earlier half of the twentieth century, at least not in the US. And the current versions of Akizidenz are dramatically different from what was in use before Lange started changing the design in the 1950s. Franklin is ok, as are most of the old ATF sans faces, such as Alt Gothic, Inland Gothic, Blair, etc.

The reason I suggest Richmond is that a lot of packaging was hand lettered up to the 1970s, and Richmond has a hand rendered feel.

James: "the current versions of Akzidenz are dramatically different from what was in use before Lange started changing the design in the 1950s"

Here is a comparison between the early Accidenz Grotesk (pre 1950) and the digital Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk, available today. "dramatically different"... Mmmh... Really?

dr

Really.
There were dramatic differences in letterforms between different sizes of AG, in the normal weight, that Lange evened out.
In general, he made AG look more like the new Haas face which would be subsequently named Helvetica.
Which is ironic (or merely incestuous), as Helvetica was a modification of AG.

'Helvetica was a modification of AG' : I do not think so, actually, I think it draws "inspiration" from other typefaces from the same era, but whatever.

btw nick, your book arrived. I couldnt put my hands on it yet (i'll be in france in 2 weeks), but thank you very much. i'm impatient.