Anyone? I'll send you cookies if you can help.

FontFont's Seria, or Seria Sans, Storm's Sebastian and Lanston's Deepdene.

When travelling in neighbouring states, I�ve noticed bumper stickers and the like with phrases such as �Don�t Californicate Oregon�. Is FB Calibornian an anagramic variation of a similar but much more obscure movement... �Don�t be Born in California�? or from the fire season... �Don�t Burn in California�?

I know that making fun of a typo is a bit of a cheap shot... especially when I am so frequently guilty of much worse ones. In the spirit of fun only...

cheers,
Dana

Thanks for all the advice, everyone.
I've been experimenting a lot, and nothing looks as good as Mrs. eaves for the title page and cover type. But it's not working for the body copy, partly because of the low x-height and partly because of the messed up letterspacing.

Of everything I've looked at for the text, the two faces that look best are baskerville (which I guess eaves is based on) and cochin.

Do you think it's strange to use two different serif text faces like this? They won't be on the same page as each other ... the mrs. eaves will only be at the front of the book, since there won't be display copy used with the text.

One thing I find I like for this project is a capital W without a center serif (as in the baskerville and the eaves, but not the cochin). I know this sounds nitpicky, but it stands out for me since the title starts with W.

How about Vendetta? It's got a bit of quirkiness that adds character (No pun), but it's not silly. It has an edginess that would stand up to the blackness of the photos (I took a peek; rich work�I think your font is going to have some substance to it.) If you remain attached to Mrs. Eaves, using it as display type and Baskerville for body copy would not be amiss. They are conceptual cousins. It's just that Baskerville can be a bit thin.

If you want a Mrs Eaves that actually works for text, try The Foundry's Wilson:
http://www.foundrytypes.co.uk/foundry_wilson/wilson.html
For one thing, it's not trendy at all - it's pretty rare.

Another option is to use InDesign, since its optical spacing fixes Mrs Eaves's horrid spacing.

Photopolymer letterpress printing: since letterpress has notable gain while offset doesn't, you can't really have the same exact font come out nice on both mediums. But if you find a typeface that has many weights in a very tight range (or if you manage to tweak the weight of the font yourself, or maybe outsource that task) then you could just swap the two weights as needed. Just watch the linebreaks if the two weights are not uniwidth.

hhp

Spooky. Today I got the latest issue of M-Real magazine (which includes an interesting co-interview with Spiekermann, as well as an article about the mechanics of reading/perception) and guess what font they're using for text and titling: Wilson!

hhp

Hi Paul,
Looking at your photographs I keep thinking of Franklin Gothic. It may be the foreigner's romantic view of early 20th Century New York but, to me, those desolate industrial spaces are calling for some of Benton's faces.

I think a nicely spaced and carefully sized Franklin Gothic Heavy would work very well for titles and, specially, captions. And if you print photopolymer-letterpress it will help convey the strong human-scale dimension of that face.

Raph Levien has on his site some images of the 1923 ATF specimen book, with nice samples of both Franklin and News Gothic.
Link to Linotype's ITC Franklin Gothic.

I hope this helps, your work is really good and, regardless of your type choice, I'm sure it will be a beautiful book.

<font class="dontLookLikeCrap">
Thank you, Jesus, for the kind words about my work.

I'm interested in earlier the remark that Mrs. Eaves' spacing is fixed by Indesign. I thought this might be the case and printed a sample; indesign definitely flowed the paragraph better, but the letterspacing within the words was about the same. Is there a preference or something within the program that can adjust this?

I've also been looking at Veljovic. The color is a bit light, but otherwise I like the type very much.

I'm definitely sticking to serif fonts .. my experiments with sans serif just haven't worked out for this project.
Still looking, but I'm considering all the suggestions here and I greatly appreciate all the input.
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Of the suggestions above, my favorite is the Wilson. If the Mrs Eaves is working for you, the Wilson will probably work just as well or better.

Especially if you're going to go through with the photopolymer, I might also suggest Centaur. The current digitization suffers from being a bit thin and spidery, but cranking up the press gain could fix that. I'm working on optically scaled versions, but it's going to be quite some time before those are ready.

The Sierra Club has used Centaur in their photo books to great effect. I was just looking at "This is the American Earth".

Regarding your question about word spacing in InDesign:

Open the Paragraph palette. In the fly-out menu, choose Justification. Then set the Desired value to something less than 100% to tighten the word spacing. (I've used values as low as 40%-50% for headlines.)

Note that the Minimum and Maximum settings only come into play when text is justified, and that your Minimum percentage must always be smaller than the Desired setting.

Paul:
You are using "optical kerning" rather than "metrics", aren't you.

And, if you like Wilson, you really need to check out FF Clifford. There will be no need to fix the spacing with it!

I was originally using metrics, which seemed quite uneven. optical kerning improves the evenness, but doesn't actually make it look right.

Does anyone have opinions on Storm Andulka? I've been looking at Storm's samples and I like it very much. I'm considering using it for text, and using Mrs Eaves for the titling capitals. I have a hard time trusting my judgement based on someone else's text samples (in Czech!).

Some really good suggestions here.

Keep in mind that with traditional letterpress, depending on the font and paper choice, the line weights can tend to come out appearing just a tad narrower than with other printing methods.

Have you considered using Democratica as a typeface? It's got a twist to it, and I particularly like combining the cap and lowercase letterforms in the same word, as they have the same height.

Might be a bit trendy, tho.