What is a book font family?

New 8-font serif book family: Amitale (ah-mi-tah'-lay)

Some of you may have seen the release news on Creative Pro last week. Here's a link to that release.

Others may have seen the changes in the font section or on the bergsland.org home page. The actual Amitale page is found here. The only way that affects you is that there is a deeply discounted sale on the site for the entire family at $49. Just click on the link to the Amitale page.

But the reason for this posting is to discuss what a book font is. Why is it important?

Books, magazines, newsletters, & the like need many special features

• Traditionally, book was a weight of a font. It typically was a little lighter than medium and a little heavier than light. In addition, it was a little more narrow than either light or medium in an attempt to allow more copy to be set for a given page area.

A book weight, like Eras book or Futura Book, fulfilled the above criteria, but the resulting fonts were virtually useless for setting books or any periodical. They may have been legible (& that's debatable). However, they are certainly not comfortably readable. A Garamond Book or Jenson Book would make sense because these fonts started as very readable typestyles.

There are very few Book weights

In addition, the book weights that are available have not been designed for use in books, in most cases. I found that I often needed special features for book production that were hard to find in any one font.

This problem has been lessened with the large character count of many OpenType Pro fonts. They no longer have the 256 character limit. They can have tens of thousands of characters (or glyphs, which technically are character variations). But the old 8-bit fonts were very limited.

What is needed for book design?
Here is a list to guide us in the search:

• Readability: Any font used for large amounts of copy MUST be easy to read, very comfortable, and not consciously seen. Readers should be able to pick up your typographic designs and with no muss or fuss simply sit down and start reading. In general, this means that you need a traditional serif typestyle or a humanist sans serif.
  
• Design characteristics:
  

1. Not too dark or light
2. Not too wide or narrow
3. A slight modulation in stroke width
4. An open aperture: some of you may remember my article on humanist sans fonts for DT&G typography at graphic-design.com. In that article, I had a little table showing readability differences for a half-dozen fonts. Blogger placed it at the top of this posting.A book font has to cover all of these design areas.
5. Oval rather than round
6. A natural writing axis for the thins & thicks

But this really does not begin to talk about the things necessary for usefulness. I found myself (before I started designing my own fonts) being really frustrated because the only fonts available at that time (the early 1990s) were limited to 256 characters. This put many limitations of typography. For example:

• You could have have small caps or lowercase, but not both in the same font
• Ligatures were very hard to find. All you had were the four or so you didn't really need: fi, fl, ffi, ffl.
• Swashes were almost unknown unless they were in a separate font and the only one commonly available was the Caslon Extra set.
  
• When you did they were usually in a separate font that made using them for daily typesetting almost impossible
• True book weights were usually not available
• The bolds were often plugged up as the counters became smaller and smaller
• The letterspacing (tracking) on small caps copy was not automatically a little wider to help with shape visibility
  
• Characters like the open ballot box (an outlined square for readers to check) were not available.

In general, the book fonts I was looking for simply did not exist. Now, with Amitale. I have designed some fonts that work very well for multi-page production (& for general graphic design). At least, they meet my needs. My hope is that you will find them useful as well.

Thanks for listening... David