in Design
Choosing a text face for a novel
A text face has to survive three hundred pages without being noticed. Here is what to look at before you fall for a specimen.
Choosing a typeface for a novel is less about taste than it first appears. A face that looks handsome in a specimen at display size can be tiring over a full book, and a face that looks plain on its own can make a page that reads beautifully. The useful questions are practical.
Start with the text, not the type
Read the manuscript first, or at least a good part of it. Its period, setting, tone and pace can suggest a direction, though they should not dictate one. A historical novel does not need a period typeface, and a contemporary one does not need a modern face. What matters more is length and density. A long book with long paragraphs needs a face that is economical and even. A short book with a lot of dialogue and white space can afford something with more character.
Consider the extent too. Some faces are narrow and fit a lot of words to the line; others are wide and generous. The same manuscript can vary by a significant number of pages depending on the face, and page count affects print cost, spine width and the feel of the book in the hand.
What to look for in the face
x-height is the height of the lowercase letters relative to the capitals. A face with a large x-height looks bigger at the same point size and can be set smaller; one with a small x-height looks more classical and needs a little more size and leading. Neither is better, but you cannot compare faces fairly at the same nominal size.
Colour is the overall darkness of a block of text. Print a page of real text at the intended size and look at it from arm’s length. It should be even, with no letters that jump out and no patches that look too light or heavy. Thin hairlines can disappear on uncoated or recycled paper, and some faces designed for digital display look spindly in print.
The italic deserves its own test. Novels use italics for emphasis, thoughts, foreign words and titles, sometimes a great deal. A good italic should be clearly distinct from the roman but should not break the colour of the line.
A text face for a book needs more than four styles. Check for true small caps, old-style and lining figures, proper ligatures, and full punctuation, including en and em dashes, curly quotation marks and a well-drawn ellipsis. If the book includes names or words from other languages, check that the accented characters are present and well made. Fixing a missing glyph late in production is always awkward.
Well-established choices include revivals of Garamond, Caslon and Baskerville, Monotype’s Bembo, which is based on types cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldus Manutius, Jan Tschichold’s Sabon, Hermann Zapf’s Palatino, and Robert Slimbach’s Minion. There are many more, including a steady supply of good contemporary designs. Different digital versions of the same historical face can vary a great deal, so compare the specific release rather than the name.
Test it properly
Set a real chapter, not a paragraph of placeholder text, at the planned trim size, margins, size and leading. Print it on paper close to the stock the book will use. Include dialogue, italics, numbers and a chapter opening. Read it, rather than looking at it, for ten minutes or so.
Then compare two or three candidates side by side at matched x-heights. The differences that matter tend to show up only at this stage: one face runs longer, one italic is too narrow, one has an awkward lowercase g that becomes irritating by page twenty.
Remember the ebook
In most reflowable ebooks, the reader chooses the typeface, so the print face will not always survive into the digital edition. If you want to embed a font in an ebook, check that the licence allows it before making the decision. A face that cannot be used across all editions is not automatically ruled out, but it is worth knowing early.
The right face is usually the one readers never mention.