Trade
Source Serif 4 at a comfortable size, chapter openers set left with a plain arabic number, running heads carrying the book title and the author. Nothing here will date, and nothing here will be the reason a reader notices the typesetting. That is the whole intention: a trade paperback is a piece of design whose job is to disappear.
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
Any book, and the right answer when you are not sure.
Do not use it for
A book that wants a voice on the page. A literary novel or a memoir is better served by Garamond or Memoir, which have one.
What it decides
- Text face
- Source Serif 4, transitional serif, by Frank Grießhammer, Adobe.
- Size and leading
- 10.5 pt on 14.9 pt (1.42×). Adjustable; this is where it starts.
- Paragraph indent
- 1.2 em, except the first paragraph of a chapter and the first after any break.
- Chapter opening
- Set left, sunk 20% down the text block, numbered in arabic figures, with the opening words in small capitals.
- 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 author on the right, in small capitals.
- Page number
- Centred at the foot. Roman in the front matter, restarting at arabic 1 on the first chapter.
About the typeface
Source Serif 4 is a transitional serif, drawn by Frank Grießhammer, Adobe. 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 Trade
Open a Word file and switch between all eight designs in a click. Free, nothing uploaded.
Format a book →