Type faces differ, too, and for equally valid reasons. There are the important design and style differences that comprise the old style, transitional and modern faces suitable for books. And distinctions in weight or "color"; distinctions in roundness, in degree of compactness, and distinctions in legibility, and in size.
To the designer of books, type face selection is important in relation to the character of the text to be printed. The size of type selected, and the amount of "leading," or space between its lines, has a bearing upon the number of pages the manuscript will make.
Some shorter manuscripts, for instance, need to be "driven out" or padded, to make the book appear greater in content than it actually is, to justify its price. Others need every possible degree of compression to get the manuscript into a lesser number of pages, which, in turn, means fewer "forms" to print, fewer "signatures" to bind, and less paper to use.
To turn from the functional use of type to the aesthetic, and also make a rather loose analogy, one may think of the type face as a garment with which the designer dresses the author's words.
In this instance the designer selects a type face to develop an "allusive" format—to reflect something of the style of the period of the manuscript. Bruce Rogers, the greatest master of allusive book-making, in his "Paragraphs on Printing" points out that in a small way this is "like planning the stage setting for a play.
"An up-to-date style for an ancient text would compare with staging Hamlet in modern dress. However novel and effective in its own way, you feel it to be strange, and this sense of strangeness is an annoying distraction; you are forced to think of the setting and the designer rather than the text."
It is easier to suggest a feminine appeal with types like Estienne or Fairfield or Garamond, than with less decorative faces such as Baskerville, Bodoni or Janson. Yet it is foolish to go too far in this direction. Strictly speaking, there are no definitely feminine or masculine types—the way type is handled has much to do with the mood it evokes. And it is dangerous to pin labels on types without knowing a great deal of their background and derivation.
The idea of using many distinguished types for the composition of this book was deliberate: The intent was to demonstrate, on a uniform paper surface and under identical printing conditions, the "behavior" of twenty of the finest types of our time.
And to afford a basis for comparison that might not only illumine some of the points mentioned, but also provide reference specimens of these notable book faces. To that end, a complete alphabet showing in caps and lower-case of each face is included, with a brief account of its background and development.
Not every essay will be equally appealing, typographically. Yet the variety of faces used in setting them seems more successful than would be the less sensitive treatment of uniform typography. Reading the articles and studying the performance of the individual types should provide an increased appreciation of the part typography plays in developing the book's format.