Memoir
Lora's curves are brushed rather than drawn, which gives the page a warmth the classical faces deliberately avoid. Chapters open left with the title set large and no number, because a memoir's chapters are usually called something rather than numbered. Scene breaks are white space alone, the gentlest break there is.
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
Memoir, essays, narrative non-fiction, anything in the first person.
Do not use it for
Reference and technical books. The informality that suits a personal story reads as imprecision over a table of data.
What it decides
- Text face
- Lora, contemporary serif with brushed curves, by Olga Karpushina and Alexei Vanyashin, Cyreal.
- Size and leading
- 10.5 pt on 15.5 pt (1.48×). Adjustable; this is where it starts.
- Paragraph indent
- 1.1 em, except the first paragraph of a chapter and the first after any break.
- Chapter opening
- Set left, sunk 30% down the text block, with no number.
- Scene break
- White space alone, the gentlest break there is, and the one that never interrupts the reading.
- Running head
- The book title on the left-hand page, the chapter title on the right.
- Page number
- At the foot, on the outer edge. Roman in the front matter, restarting at arabic 1 on the first chapter.
About the typeface
Lora is a contemporary serif with brushed curves, drawn by Olga Karpushina and Alexei Vanyashin, Cyreal. 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 Memoir
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