I need to choose a body font (serif) for a book that will be printed on letterpress. My experience has been with offset and digital printing only. The book will be printed using plates made from an InDesign file rather than being typeset in metal.
Most new fonts were designed for offset printing and/or digital screens, and many revivals of classic faces have been updated in ways that may not work quite so well in metal. So I will be grateful if people can suggest good text faces that they have used successfully on letterpress.
The book is a reprint of a memoir from the early 20th century, printed in Bodoni or something similar. I'd like to reflect the original if possible, but am open to various suggestions.
Edit: I meant to post this in Typeface Design but accidentally put it in Font Technology, and I don't see a way to change this.
Comments
Fractions, kerning, character substitutions, ligatures, swashes, and old-style numbering did not only appear after the introduction of digital type. In fact, lots of OpenType's features came about to mimick more of what was possible with hand-set type, not the other way around.
Anecdotically (one may want to refresh my memory on this), the largest non-western text publisher in France only fairly recently switched from metal to full-digital input, because before, the requirements of their work could not be faithfully reproduced on a computer.
Of course I’m biased, but I think it looks spectacular!
I designed the ‘Book’ weight to be quite dark on the page. On e-ink displays the type tends to thin out, and a strong Book weight counteracts that effect. I drew a Light weight in which both the hairlines and the main strokes are thinner than in Book, but the spacing of the two fonts is identical. So effectively, together with the Regular weight interpolated halfway between Light and Book, you can switch between these fonts without text reflow, picking the weight that looks best for a specific output method.
(The bolder weights’ spacing is also identical, but the hairlines stay the same as in Book there, so they are not ‘true grades’ like Light and Book.)
This is the Light weight with the Book weight in light grey:
Identifont has a list of fonts with grades, but there are more, e.g. Hoefler & Co has Chronicle and Mercury.