Linotype Search 1: I assure you. This is fun.

I love the font Kellan Peck* used for the body text of Ray Bradbury's Illustrated Man (1951, Book-of-the-Month Club, Doubleday). It is muy elegante, pero muy snazzy. Very readable and subtley exciting. Obviously I've never written a review for fonts before so I can't competently describe why I like this. And yes, this interest in books design is new, so perhaps my taste is crap.

It didn't seem to be on Word for Mac or Windows. And not all designers are nice enough to indicate what font they used in the layout. I was about to consult Susan til I found something much more fun:

My new lunchbreak pastime:
http://www.linotype.com/fontidentifier.html

It takes you through specific features of the font, presenting you with various samples of a given letter. It always starts with: What type of tail does the upper-case 'Q' have?

How many sentences start with the letter Q? And what are the chances that the proper nouns will start with an uppercase Q? Frankly, I don't know. But it was damn hard to scour this book for it. So on I went.

It was particularly useful to read the proper term for various features like bowl, cusp, serif (ok I knew serif na but it was nice to see the word used in context). However, I realized that I couldn't get any decent results unless I hazarded a guess for the Q. What Q would suit this family? Tail crossing? Tail touching? Hmmm...

Perpetua, no.
Devin, no.
Weiss, no....WAIT! (You know how some fonts look really different when you switch to a point smaller or bigger?)

YES! WEISS®Roman by Emil Rudolf Weiβ 1928 (yay!)

Try it, if you have a decent library you're bound to have one book with a font that isn't Helvetica, Times, Palatino, Arial, Garamond, Bembo, Caslon, etc. (Hm, what IS the most widely used font ofr body text? Nuninuninuninu...)



*No, I am not pretending to have insider knowledge about book design by name dropping Weiss or Kellan Peck. I do not know them from Adam and this is the only sample of their work that I have. But I like crediting my sources. It is polite. : )