Lyric
Crimson Pro sets lighter than anything else here, and this theme leans into it: wide leading, a deep sink before each chapter opens, no running head to crowd the top of the page. Verse keeps its line breaks and wraps with a hanging indent rather than being reflowed.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago … having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway, and she said nothing at all for a long while.
Use it for
Poetry, short stories, aphorism, anything where the white space is doing work.
Do not use it for
A 400-page novel. The leading that makes forty lines of poetry beautiful adds eighty pages to a long book, and you pay for every one of them.
What it decides
- Text face
- Crimson Pro, old-style serif in the garamond tradition, by Jacques Le Bailly, after Sebastian Kosch.
- Size and leading
- 11.5 pt on 18.6 pt (1.62×). Adjustable; this is where it starts.
- Paragraph indent
- None. Paragraphs are separated by space instead, which suits a book that is scanned rather than read straight through.
- Chapter opening
- Centred, sunk 34% down the text block, with no number.
- Scene break
- A centred · with space either side.
- Running head
- None. The top of the page is left clear.
- Page number
- Centred at the foot. Roman in the front matter, restarting at arabic 1 on the first chapter.
About the typeface
Crimson Pro is an old-style serif in the garamond tradition, drawn by Jacques Le Bailly, after Sebastian Kosch. It is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows it to be embedded in a document, including one you sell, without restriction or attribution in the book itself. The licences page reproduces the full text.
The print PDF embeds a subset of it, only the characters your book actually uses, so a three-hundred-page interior comes to a couple of megabytes rather than ten. The EPUB does not embed it by default, because an ebook reader has chosen their own face and size, often for their eyesight, and overriding that is the most damaging thing an ebook stylesheet can do. There is a switch if you want it anyway.
See your own book in Lyric
Open a Word file and switch between all eight designs in a click. Free, nothing uploaded.
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