Book and Regular – who started?

Matthijs Sluiter

When did the habit/feature com about of having both Book and Regular in a typeface?
And if anyone knows, was this around the same time for Sans and Serif? 

Was this introduced by multiple foundries?
So many questions.

Today I thought I knew something about this subject, but on second thought I have no clue what my assumptions are based on.

Thomas Phinney

AFAIK, it is still quite rare. I would be interested to know if it is more common than I realize. Are there more than a dozen typefaces that include both weights?

Nick Shinn

Google “Typedrawers Book Regular”:
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/3349/book-regular-medium/p3

Thomas Phinney

And (from that thread) the short answer to my comment: perhaps relatively rare among major vendors in the past century... except for ITC.

Matthijs Sluiter

Thanks so much! I will dig into the post you suggested, Nick. Also, I retrieved a different discussion on the subject, started by Alphabettes. Blog post by Robin Mientjes, and a complementary Twitter poll with answers directing all over the place.