Book design

To the untutored eye, there might not appear to be much to book design. Most books seem to be comprised simply of slabs of text interspersed with a few headlines and chapter headings. But to its practitioners, book design is an arcane mixture of art, science and not a little religion.
This is not the place to go into the finer points of typography. For a start, we don't have the space. Whole libraries have been devoted to it. Instead, it might be useful to outline some basics in the choices of fonts, line spacing, chapter headings and covers.

Fonts

Moveable type was invented independently, first in China and then in the early fifteenth century in Germany, when Johannes Gutenberg began printing the Bible. Gutenberg's original "black letter" was Gothic in form, and emulated the ornate style used in handwritten books. In fifteenth century Italy, printers rejected the Gothic style in favour of lettera antiqua, a much simpler and more open form that looked for inspiration to classical antiquity. Their typefaces, or fonts, are the basis of nearly all modern faces and the standard, upright version of most faces is still known as Roman.

There are literally thousands of fonts for use in almost all conceivable circumstances — and a great many, in the opinion of knowledgeable observers, with no conceivable use at all. Leaving aside fancy typefaces, fonts can be divided into two main categories: serif faces which have curlicues or "serifs" at the end of the letters as well as variable width in the line or "stroke" that forms each character and sans-serif faces, which do not have serifs and where the stroke width remains constant. Thanks to the ubiquity of computers, the best known serif font is Times New Roman and the best known sans-serif is Arial (or Helvetica or Swiss, depending on your computer).

Conventional wisdom has it that serif fonts are easier to read on the printed page (and conversely, sans-serif fonts are easier to read on screen) and in this instance conventional wisdom is nearly always right. For most books, the main body text should be in a serif font, with sans being used (if at all) for things like headings, captions, tables and quotations.

Which font to choose? There's nothing wrong with Times. On the contrary, there's a lot right with it, which is why it is used so much. Its only real problem is its ubiquity. Book designers tend to steer clear of it for that very reason. While there is a huge number of typefaces to choose from, most books are still set in fonts whose origins go back a long way, sometimes to as long ago as the seventeenth century, a tribute to the typographers who designed them. We list some of the best below. (Click on the font name to open a PDF with examples. You will need Acrobat Reader to view them)

Formal traditional body text. Good for novels, biographies, histories etc.
Baskerville 10.5/13 pt
Bodoni 10.5/13 pt
Caslon 10.5/13 pt

Warm traditional body text. Good for modern novels, short stories, poems
Bembo 10.5/13 pt
Century 725 10.5/13 pt
Century 725 10.5/14 pt
Cheltenham 10.5/13 pt
Garamond 10.5/13 pt
Plantin 10.5/13 pt
Optima 10.5/13 pt

For a proper comparison you must print the pages. Comparisons on screen are never satisfactory.

Type size

Type is specified in points with 1 point = 1/72 of an inch. Body text in books can range from 9 points to 12 points (or higher in large print books). For large text areas anything much less than 10 points in most faces is difficult to read and most books tend to be set between 10 and 11 points, with 12 points being used for children's books.

Just because two faces have the same point size does not mean that they look the same size. Different faces have different lengths of ascenders and descenders (the bits that stick above or below the main text in letters like p or b) and different x-heights (the height of the main body of the letter) and as a result can appear to be of different size even though nominally the same point size. Take a look at Bodoni and Century 725 to see examples. Century 725 in10.5 points looks at least as big as 11pt Bodoni.

Leading

The gap between lines or leading is also very important. Type is specified as size/leading. If the leading is the same as the type size (e.g. 10/10 pt), known as solid text, then the text can look rather cramped. At least one extra point of leading is needed and often two or three is preferred, since the wider the gap between the lines the easier the text is to read. On the other hand, the bigger the leading the greater number of pages needed. For example a 200 page book in 11/12 pt would be about 216 pages in 11/13 pt and 233 pages in 11/14pt. In the same way, 10.5 pt text will run out typically about 5% shorter than 11 pt. And again, some fonts, like Times or Plantin, are relatively compact and run out 4-5% shorter than a font like Garamond. There is often a trade-off between aesthetics, making the book as easy to read as possible and producing it at an economic size.

The type of book can also be important in choosing leading. More serious or academic texts can usually be set fairly close leaded while novels or short stories generally need bigger leading.