I am getting ready to typeset a book. This is kind of a part 2 to a book that I put together 15 years ago. The book is non-fiction and has true stories about my fathers life as a cattle trader, livestock photographer, western artist, etc…
With the first book, I delved in and did a bunch of research on laying out a book. I remember that I joined a forum of people that worked typesetting books. I learned a lot about widows and orphans, Em dash, En dash, etc…
I decided to use Brioso for my main font on that first book. Some people told me I was nuts, but it seemed to look good. I had/have the full Brioso Pro font that shipped with that version of ID back then. (3.0?) (maybe it was a bonus download at the time?) I used Brioso Display for the Chapter titles, Brioso regular for body text, Briso Italic with Swash for running chapter, book and page numbers. Brioso Bold for Drop Cap. I used Myriad Pro semibold for captions and I don’t think I used any other fonts in the book.
Looking back at that old book, I don’t think that the captions were a good fit with the Brioso text.
Thought I would do a Google search on recommended book fonts.
Baskerville is in almost every list. I like this font it is readable and seems to flow good on the page. With the typekit, I only have Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic. That is probably enough. I might continue to use Brioso for the Chapter titles and running stuff.
I looked at Adobe Garamond Pro and it seems like a good font, but I can’t get over the width of the capital H. It looks about a forth too wide. It jumps off the page and bothers me.
I have extended font sets in the following fonts:
Brioso Pro (44 variants)
Garamond Premier Pro (34 variants)
Adobe Jenson Pro (8 variants)
Minion Pro (10 variants)
Myriad Pro (20 variants)
Sitka (24 variants) I think this is a Microsoft font?
Warnock Pro (23 variants)
There may be more, but those are ones I found right away.
Minion and Warnock are very readable fonts, but seem to look blacker on the page. Not sure, but I think Minion for sure has thicker and taller characters at the same font size compared to Baskerville.
I guess I am posting this for some kind of feedback in selecting a font for a book. Balancing that selection with the fonts I have or the fonts available to me from the Adobe Type Kit.
Thanks, -Kirk
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