Interior Typography Specimen

All faces are open-license fonts, free for commercial print use. One body face, one display face per book.

Romance

Trim 5.25 × 8  ·  Gutter 0.75″  ·  Outside 0.5″  ·  Text block 4.0″ — warm and high contrast; the page should read soft.

Display faces
Cormorant Garamond — safest pairing with any body face

Part One

The Orchard in Late Summer

Marcellus

Part One

The Orchard in Late Summer

Playfair Display — most commercial, most overused

Part One

The Orchard in Late Summer

Body faces
FaceSample at spec size
Crimson Pro
11.5 / 15

Elena had promised herself she would not look at him across the market square, and she managed it for nearly a full minute. The peaches were her excuse — she turned them over one by one, weighing each in her palm as though ripeness were a question of great civic importance.

“You’re bruising them,” Marcus said, suddenly beside her, and the whole careful architecture of her indifference came down at once. Seven years, she thought. Seven years, and his voice still does that.

Alegreya
11 / 14.5

Elena had promised herself she would not look at him across the market square, and she managed it for nearly a full minute. The peaches were her excuse — she turned them over one by one, weighing each in her palm as though ripeness were a question of great civic importance.

“You’re bruising them,” Marcus said, suddenly beside her, and the whole careful architecture of her indifference came down at once. Seven years, she thought. Seven years, and his voice still does that.

EB Garamond
12 / 15.5

Elena had promised herself she would not look at him across the market square, and she managed it for nearly a full minute. The peaches were her excuse — she turned them over one by one, weighing each in her palm as though ripeness were a question of great civic importance.

“You’re bruising them,” Marcus said, suddenly beside her, and the whole careful architecture of her indifference came down at once. Seven years, she thought. Seven years, and his voice still does that.

Crime / Mystery / Thriller

Trim 5.25 × 8  ·  Gutter 0.75″  ·  Outside 0.5″  ·  Text block 4.0″ — tight and invisible; a condensed sans display against a serif body is the category standard.

Display faces
Oswald

Day Three

What the River Kept

Archivo

Day Three

What the River Kept

Barlow Condensed

Day Three

What the River Kept

Body faces
FaceSample at spec size
Source Serif 4
10.5 / 14

The call came in at 4:17 a.m., which told Detective Reyes two things before she picked up: it was bad, and it was hers. Nothing good happens at 4:17, and nothing that happens at 4:17 goes to anyone else on the rotation.

The house on Delancey was dark except for one window on the second floor. No forced entry. No neighbors awake. And on the kitchen table, arranged with terrible patience, three passports — all with her photograph, none with her name.

Faustina
11 / 14.5

The call came in at 4:17 a.m., which told Detective Reyes two things before she picked up: it was bad, and it was hers. Nothing good happens at 4:17, and nothing that happens at 4:17 goes to anyone else on the rotation.

The house on Delancey was dark except for one window on the second floor. No forced entry. No neighbors awake. And on the kitchen table, arranged with terrible patience, three passports — all with her photograph, none with her name.

Spectral
10.5 / 14.5

The call came in at 4:17 a.m., which told Detective Reyes two things before she picked up: it was bad, and it was hers. Nothing good happens at 4:17, and nothing that happens at 4:17 goes to anyone else on the rotation.

The house on Delancey was dark except for one window on the second floor. No forced entry. No neighbors awake. And on the kitchen table, arranged with terrible patience, three passports — all with her photograph, none with her name.

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Trim 6 × 9  ·  Gutter 0.875″  ·  Outside 0.625″  ·  Text block 4.5″ — classical and roomy; long books, so per-page economy compounds.

Display faces
Cinzel — inscriptional Roman caps, reads epic

Book the First

The Ninth Gate of Vareth

Marcellus

Book the First

The Ninth Gate of Vareth

Spectral SC

Book the First

The Ninth Gate of Vareth

Body faces
FaceSample at spec size
EB Garamond
11.5 / 15

The navigator’s guild taught that the fold between stars was silent, but Ishaan had crossed it eleven times now and knew better. It hummed — low and patient, like a held breath in a cathedral — and on the twelfth crossing, something in the hum said his name.

Below the observation deck, the colony ship Meridian carried forty thousand sleepers and one very old lie, and Ishaan was the last person alive who knew which berth the lie was sleeping in.

Cardo
12 / 15.5

The navigator’s guild taught that the fold between stars was silent, but Ishaan had crossed it eleven times now and knew better. It hummed — low and patient, like a held breath in a cathedral — and on the twelfth crossing, something in the hum said his name.

Below the observation deck, the colony ship Meridian carried forty thousand sleepers and one very old lie, and Ishaan was the last person alive who knew which berth the lie was sleeping in.

Vollkorn
10.5 / 14.5

The navigator’s guild taught that the fold between stars was silent, but Ishaan had crossed it eleven times now and knew better. It hummed — low and patient, like a held breath in a cathedral — and on the twelfth crossing, something in the hum said his name.

Below the observation deck, the colony ship Meridian carried forty thousand sleepers and one very old lie, and Ishaan was the last person alive who knew which berth the lie was sleeping in.

Young Adult

Trim 5.5 × 8.5  ·  Gutter 0.8″  ·  Outside 0.6″  ·  Text block 4.1″ — larger x-height, open counters, leading runs long relative to point size on purpose.

Display faces
Fraunces — has SOFT and WONK axes worth exploring

Chapter One

Everyone Knows Except Me

Outfit — the clean contemporary option

Chapter One

Everyone Knows Except Me

Bricolage Grotesque

Chapter One

Everyone Knows Except Me

Body faces
FaceSample at spec size
Literata
10.5 / 15

Here is the thing nobody tells you about being struck by lightning: the hospital gives you a pamphlet. An actual pamphlet, like it happens often enough to need one, titled So You’ve Survived a Lightning Strike.

What the pamphlet does not cover is what to do when every clock you walk past starts running backward, or when your best friend Priya looks at you across the cafeteria like she already knows — because in eleven days, apparently, she will.

Andada Pro
10.5 / 15

Here is the thing nobody tells you about being struck by lightning: the hospital gives you a pamphlet. An actual pamphlet, like it happens often enough to need one, titled So You’ve Survived a Lightning Strike.

What the pamphlet does not cover is what to do when every clock you walk past starts running backward, or when your best friend Priya looks at you across the cafeteria like she already knows — because in eleven days, apparently, she will.

Newsreader
11 / 15

Here is the thing nobody tells you about being struck by lightning: the hospital gives you a pamphlet. An actual pamphlet, like it happens often enough to need one, titled So You’ve Survived a Lightning Strike.

What the pamphlet does not cover is what to do when every clock you walk past starts running backward, or when your best friend Priya looks at you across the cafeteria like she already knows — because in eleven days, apparently, she will.

Horror

Trim 5.25 × 8  ·  Gutter 0.75″  ·  Outside 0.5″  ·  Text block 4.0″ — darker color on the page, sharper serifs, slightly cramped.

Display faces
IM Fell English SC — seventeenth-century revival, carries the most atmosphere

The First Night

The House Remembers You

Bodoni Moda — the cold, clinical option

The First Night

The House Remembers You

Cinzel

The First Night

The House Remembers You

Body faces
FaceSample at spec size
Frank Ruhl Libre
10.5 / 14

The realtor had called it a “motivated sale,” and Ruth understood why by the second night, when she found the wardrobe standing open again — the wardrobe she had locked, whose key sat at the bottom of her coat pocket, still warm.

She counted the coats hanging inside. Nine. She had brought seven. The two at the far end were child-sized, damp at the hems, and smelled faintly of the lake.

Manuale
10.5 / 14

The realtor had called it a “motivated sale,” and Ruth understood why by the second night, when she found the wardrobe standing open again — the wardrobe she had locked, whose key sat at the bottom of her coat pocket, still warm.

She counted the coats hanging inside. Nine. She had brought seven. The two at the far end were child-sized, damp at the hems, and smelled faintly of the lake.

Petrona
11 / 14.5

The realtor had called it a “motivated sale,” and Ruth understood why by the second night, when she found the wardrobe standing open again — the wardrobe she had locked, whose key sat at the bottom of her coat pocket, still warm.

She counted the coats hanging inside. Nine. She had brought seven. The two at the far end were child-sized, damp at the hems, and smelled faintly of the lake.