Is Kepler in that set?

Yes- there are many Kepler subsets.
Do you like it? What size would you recommend?
Do you think a leader of 15 is good?
Thank you!

Yes- there are many Kepler subsets.

Should be more than enough to cover your bases. Not knowing your margins, and being purely speculative I would be sure to look at the semi-condensed.

Do you like it? What size would you recommend?
Do you think a leader of 15 is good?

Fifteen point could be a little airy. I just picked up Kepler and have not had a chance to work with it much. I would guess that having a more modern x-height you could look at a 9-10.5 pt range type size over 13 or so, again depending on your margins and grid.

Kepler is a more contemporary take on a modern type that picks up some more humanistic details. It may be too colorful for what you are doing, but could also be a good choice.

I would work with Adobe Garamond as well.

See what works well with you measure.

>The book is currently in Garamond Premier Pro but I am not sure I love it.

Let's explore your feelings towards Garamond. Were there any childhood incidents where Garamond treated you badly? Did Garamond ever come up in arguments with your mother?

Why do you need to deal with the design? Who's the publisher?

That trim size makes me think of POD. Anyway, Kepler Semicondensed at 10/13 with a little positive tracking sort of works. At that funny size the measure is a little shorter than I would like (with minimal margins), but take it for what it is worth.

If you set it on Vista and install ATM 4.1, you can use Kepler MM, and would have access to infinite variations. It is a fabulous font -- nothing so far released is as flexible. But aesthetically it is rather a mess. The humanist affects aren't convincing and the Baskerville g is in very bad taste.

A fabulous choice, very close in design, is Matthew Carter's Miller, from Font Bureau. This type virtually sets itself, and is appealing at 9 on 12 -- that's one of its sweet spots. Carter doesn't do bad taste.

Another related font, which has seen extensive use in Time, is Carter's Time Caledonia. Perhaps now that Time has switched, Carter will release this font?

Garamond doesn't seem the right choice for a psychotherapy manual.

@willow1—I’m not going to rip Mr. Slimbach, but you do often find a face with a single quirky character. Bill makes some excellent suggestions.

You might also look at Warnock Pro from the Adobe Collection. For me Adobe Garamond is neutral enough and omnipresent, which helps mitigate its specific historical roots.

Belizio or Canada Type’s Clarendon might also work nicely with a Grot. if you could put that together, but I think they might be to wide.

What I find particularly interesting about this discussion is that a writer on psychotherapy is getting deeply involved in the typographical aspects of the the book he or she is about to design and publish. Well, there are other examples of authors making decisions about typefaces to be used for their texts (G. B. Shaw for one), but I suspect that this case reveals a more general and more contemporary tendency that springs from the array of fonts available to authors on their computers.

How can you make decisions about what typeface to use without knowing more about the book itself? The author has informed us that the size of the book is 5.5x8.5 (inches). What kind of margins does he or she want? What sort of paper? The author thought that 15 point leading might be a good idea. But leading means nothing without a typesize and thus this psychotherapist reveals an entirely understandable ignorance of basic typography. Moreover, designing a book in Word might be comparable to hunting elephants with a pea-shooter.

The spot-on and pertinent question by Sil concerning childhood incidents with Garamond virtually closes the discussion and really means that if you are a psychotherapist and you are writing and publishing a book you should get a typographer to design it (as David Hamuel implied). How many typographers go in for writing books on psychotherapy?

A chacun son métier.

Well said. I think in the end I don’t mind giving rope even if the requester may be constructing a self hanging. I suspect very few have passed as a result of rough page design. I hope I’ve learned a thing or two by asking a question that revealed a lapse on my part.

You point out a few obvious clues that suggest the attempt at typography is not fully informed. Still, we can look at the origins of modern psychotherapy and create a very general historical frame—any font directly associated with a time that predates psychotherapy could be crossed off the list. What margins? Well, let’s assume enough for a thumb at the outside and enough inside that the text doesn’t get consumed by the binding. Given that, and the limited set of typefaces willow1 has to choose from, it would seem that there are very few fonts capable of setting a reasonable number of characters in widest possible measure.

Maybe if we provide as reasonable an answer as possible the asker might take away a better understanding of the task at hand, or even decide to hire a professional?