Stempel Garamond

Stempel Garamond was first issued by the Stempel foundry almost a hundred years ago as Garamond-Antiqua. It was—and remains—one of the more faithful and attractive revivals of the Garamond typefaces. There have been a number of versions since, clones, reissues, digitalizations. One of the better known would be the free URW++ Garmond No.8, which may be found readily online. It is ‘almost’ an open license font; a publisher needn’t worry about using it for print or embedding it in a PDF. I see it pretty much as a publisher’s starting kit, dependable and usable for pretty much any project.

Incidentally, its italics are based on ones actually designed by Claude Garamond, where many other Garamond typefaces use italics by Robert Granjon, a respected successor of Garamond.

The Garamond Original typeface—a name used by both Bitstream and SoftMaker—is essentially a clone of Stempel. As with Garamond No.8, they lack opentype features for those who want or need them, though SoftMaker does offer separate small caps. That makes up for much. The typeface is included in SoftMaker’s MegaFont collection, which remains a rather good deal.

Not surprisingly, various opentype projects based on Garamond No.8 have popped up over the last couple decades but none have seemed to go much of anywhere. Be that as it may, the versions that are available are quite viable alternatives to commercial Garamonds or the popular EB Garamond and other open license Garamond (or Garamond-like) fonts. Stempel Garamond, under whatever name, is a good choice for anyone producing books.

We have used versions in all Stephen Brooke’s fantasy novels set among the Mora (the Malvern Trilogy, the Mora Trilogy, etc). We are entirely likely to use Stempel again in books to come. Indeed, we consider it our default for novels.

Humanist Slab-Serifs

The Mid-Twentieth Century saw the emergence of what are sometimes called (accurately enough) ‘humanist slab-serif’ typefaces. These retained—for the most part—the rectangular serifs of earlier slab fonts but varied the axis and the other strokes to create a more humanist feel to the forms, as with the humanist sans faces that were appearing in the same period. One seemingly simple yet elegant example is Candida, which received greater recognition when Bitstream reissued it half a century later.

Around the same time, the company released a somewhat similar humanist slab of their own design, Prima. At first glance, they seem quite alike but one begins to pick out the differences quickly enough. Prima is rather unlovely beside Candida, but the latter undoubtedly influenced (or inspired) its design. It may be noted that Prima, as Adobe’s Utopia and Bitstream’s own Charter, was designed to work well with the low resolution printers of its time.

A second look will tell us Prima is pretty much identical to Bitstream’s Vera Serif, which has since developed into Deja Vu, a popular and widespread free font. Why the name change? In part, we would assume, to mark it as their open license (more or less) offering. An entire family of different fonts was attached to both Prima and Vera, sans and mono versions, designed with the same uses in mind. Deja Vu Serif is certainly a decent enough font, and beloved of the open source community, but we would be unlikely to use it to print a book.

Candida, maybe, but we’d have to pay for a license! In honesty, it’s not the sort of typeface we’d normally consider for a novel. Perhaps for some niche project it would be just the thing. There are, to be sure, other nice-looking humanist slab-serif typefaces available, and some are even open license. It has again become a rather popular concept and more than one recent release, such as IBM’s big family of typefaces, has reflected the trend. By the way, we think IBM Plex Serif is decidedly ugly (a pastiche of varying styles). We’d take Deja Vu over it, any day—it, at least, stays true to its concept.

Kameron, by Vernon Adams, looks pretty decent and is available from Google Fonts. Its lack of a separate italic is, however, problematic, and it is perhaps not really suitable to book text. To be sure, there are also a number of faces that almost fit the classification but are not quite humanist or not quite true slabs. There is not a big gap between humanist slab-serifs and some neoclassical fonts. As always, how they look on the page is more important than what category we place them in.

 

2023

The coming year, 2023, will mark our twentieth year as a publisher (though we used a different name the first couple of those years). It will also mark the release of our fiftieth title. That will be Stephen Brooke's Hocking Hills mystery, 'These Remembered Hills.' More on that as we draw nearer the release date, which we have set for January 7.

Beyond that, we will be publishing Oliver Davis Pikes's second Jack Mack science fiction adventure, 'Jumping Jack.' Tentative release date is late February, or March 4 at the latest. More to come on that one, too.

And by late spring or early summer, the latest poetry collection from Stephen Brooke, titled 'Islanders.' We have nothing set further than that but be assured there will be more books released in the coming year. And for years to come!

More on Free Fonts

Having said some words on free fonts for publishing (in the previous post), I thought I’d, ah, say some more words. Specifically, I’d mention a few popular choices that have become widely available. Why not in alphabetic order?

Alegreya is a lovely serif typeface that seems a little too ornate for the typical fiction book. I would not however, hesitate to use it for poetry—and have. Moreover, it pairs beautifully with the sans version, also free. Alegreya Sans for headings, Alegreya for body, is a combo that works great.

Century Schoolbook is one of the fonts included in the URW++ Ghostscript package I mentioned before. CS is always a good, workmanlike, and highly legible typeface. After all, it is widely specified for legal documents. For a novel? It would certainly work but might look a little old-fashioned, stodgy even, to some readers. For children’s books, as well as nonfiction, it remains a good choice.

Cormorant is a variant on the ever-popular Garamond style of typefaces, but one a little too quirky for long stretches of text. It lacks the readability for that. Great for titles, though (as is the related sans, Ysabeau), and we used it for a book of quotes once.

Crimson I mentioned before and suggested getting the latest version from the designer. It is another Garamond-ish font (or more in the Granjon vein, actually) and has some similarities to the popular Plantin typeface. That’s a good thing. There have been reports of oddities when it is printed so that is something one must watch for (as with any font). Another good workmanlike font with a touch of elegance.*

EB Garamond is pretty much the cream of the free Garamonds (although we mostly use the URW++ Garamond No.8) and practically identical to the widely used Adobe Garamond. As both are based on the same original type samples, this is not unexpected. Some might claim it is not quite as refined as the Adobe offering in terms of kerning and such, but it looks every bit as good to us. One could certainly use this typeface exclusively for text and forget the rest.

Gentium has been around a long time and is thoroughly tried and tested. It looks pretty good, too, less stodgy than many popular choices but not overdone. It does suffer somewhat from the same problem as Times New Roman; that is, it can look too closely packed in long lines. We’ve used it for poetry and it works there. It would not be a bad choice for a magazine, used in narrower columns.

The same is largely true of Linux Libertine, another font that has been around a while.

PT Serif was designed for the Russian government. It has more than a passing resemblance to Microsoft’s Constantia, probably the best of those ‘Clear Type’ fonts they brought out as a package some time back. Of course, any and all those Microsoft fonts included for ‘free’ with Windows are off-limits for publishing, but PT is a quite adequate and usable typeface.

Which brings us at last to the very popular Volkorn. As much as I like this font, I’ve never seen it as working that well in a novel. Maybe it could but I’d be more likely to use it for nonfiction. It is a solid, readable font—almost too solid.

***

Some others I might mention: Fanwood, which is based on a ‘standard’ typeface for fiction, Fairfield. The same designer, Barry Schwarz, has also crafted OFL Sorts Mill Goudy, based on Goudy Old Style. Both certainly look good but are perhaps not quite as time-tested and refined as some other offerings. Schwarz has some other Goudy-based offerings too; one might or might not find them useful.

Libre Baskerville and Libre Caslon are both projects that might not be completely perfected but might provide what one needs for a self-published project—especially if one wants that classic look such fonts provide.

Literata is a Google font originally designed for use in e-readers but one needn’t limit it to that. There is a version for print, in a large variety of weights. I’ll note that it looks somewhat like Adobe’s Minion.

Lora is also available from Google and is, again, intended more as a screen font than a print one, but doesn’t look bad on a page.

All these typefaces may be found readily enough online. Search the names. Perhaps I’ll write a post on a few of the commercial fonts we like and use, down the line, but this is enough for now.

*An addendum: There is now a Crimson Pro that is an even better choice, and available in a number of weights. If you wish to try out Crimson, this is the way to go (and it may be downloaded from Google Fonts).

Free Fonts for Publishing

Allow me to make clear before proceeding that I intend to discuss typefaces for the interior text of books. Display fonts for covers are another subject. One can get away with type there that would be entirely unsuitable for text.

So—free. You may have been warned about low quality ‘junk’ fonts. This is not as much the problem as it was in the early days of desktop publishing. There are many quite good and quite free typefaces out there. We use some ourselves at Arachis Press. Let me begin with a familiar name: Adobe.

Back in the early days of personal computers Adobe developed a rather nice typeface named Utopia. This is a slightly simplified (for the low resolution printers of the time) take on something similar to Baskerville. Utopia was intended as a sort of Times New Roman killer, a font suitable to all-around office use. It didn’t displace TNR but it proved to be a quite nice font that eventually was made free. One may see quality novels and nonfiction from the big publishing houses printed in Utopia. Though they undoubtedly use the paid version, the free font is completely acceptable.

More recently, Adobe released their free Source Serif. This typeface has roots in the 18^th Century Fournier designs and looks quite professional on the page. Not as ‘formal’ as Utopia—use whichever suits the mood of your book. One could probably get by with just those two fonts. There is also a free Source Sans; less useful as text but one could employ it effectively for chapter titles and such.

Which brings us to Charter. This is also an older design from Matthew Carter and created for much the same purposes as Utopia. Moreover, it is based on the same original typeface as Source Serif; there are differences, to be sure, but they are very similar. Which one is preferable is entirely a matter of personal taste. Charter also has a free version (more than one, actually). When I say free, I mean completely so: no cost and free to use however one wishes.

I could mention the widely available Deja Vu (aka Vera) fonts here also. They too were crafted in the early days of computers for much the same reasons as Utopia and Charter. Honestly, I do not think highly of the way they look on a printed page. Not that there is anything wrong with them; they are simply not very attractive to my eye.

There are loads of other acceptable free typefaces out there and I am not going to list them. There is all the stuff from Google Fonts, of course. Some are adequate, but be warned many are better suited to screens than printed pages. Some are not the latest and best versions, also—Crimson, which can be a pretty decent text typeface, is best downloaded from its designer, not Google. Be warned too that some of these typefaces can become problematic when sent off to a printer, with characters not printing properly and so on. Still many free fonts one may find are well designed and look good; just be sure to give any print proofs a very thorough going over!

I must mention the URW++ free package. These were the fonts donated to the Ghostscript project way back and include quite usable and professional typefaces. In particular, the Garamond No.8 and Palladio, which are our ‘default’ choices for, respectively, novels and poetry. Palladio is a variant on Palatino, and designed for URW by Zapf himself. Garamond No.8 is essentially Stempel Garamond. There are several other good fonts included. One can find the packet for download online. They may be ‘old’ designs but they hold up.

Now we at AP do not use just free fonts. We have a license for a package of Bitstream typefaces and those are every bit as likely to show up. But we could get by on free, if need be, and so could anyone else out there wishing to publish on their own. I would suggest starting with time-tested fonts like Charter and Utopia, and the URW++ package, and taking it from there.

The PDF as E-Book

The bulk of e-books sold these days (or distributed free, for that matter) are in one of the ‘reflowable’ formats: Amazon’s AZW Kindle or the open source EPUB, most commonly. MOBI, the parent format of Kindle, is also out there, retaining some popularity. All of these are essentially containers for HTML files; there is nothing wrong with a book in unpackaged HTML, whether for reading online or for downloading, and these can be read in pretty much any browser.

We try to offer our books both as EPUBs—our preference—and as Kindle. The latter, simply because so much book traffic passes through Amazon. Not as much, I think, as some would suggest. There are a great many EPUBs being distributed that are not being tracked and counted.

But there is also the venerable PDF. Every book that is printed has probably been in PDF format at some point. That’s what printers mostly work from these days. But as an e-book, the PDF has a much smaller audience. Its fixed, non-reflowable pages do not lend themselves to Kindles and other readers and tablets. On the other hand, if one reads on a computer, whether laptop or desktop, they can look very good and much more like a ‘real’ book. I prefer them personally.

We used to offer dedicated PDF versions of all our books for reading on computers (or elsewhere, if desired), directly from our store. Very few of the online vendors bother with them, Google being one exception. They sold poorly—when at all—and cluttered our store, so we dropped them. The PDF also has the disadvantage of being a somewhat larger file than the typical e-book, with or without illustrations.

But it has the advantage of looking the way we intended. The correct typefaces in the correct places, properly sized and placed illustrations, header and footer, fixed page numbers, etc. In other words, like a print book. This, we feel, is especially advantageous for books for children. A Kindle picture book is not going to cut it (not that toddlers should really be reading PDFs on your computer either). Our early reader chapter books are available as print and PDF, not in any reflowable format.

PDFs are superior for ‘how-to’ books, manuals, instructions, as well. Anything with lots of illustrations. And though poetry works well enough in the standard e-book formats, it really can be presented more effectively in the fixed-page PDF. The novel, admittedly, works quite well as Kindle or EPUB.

We note that the PDF has a certain popularity with the ‘literary’ world. Perhaps because those who inhabit that world spend a lot of time in front of computer screens. What I’m getting at here is that we are going to start offering more of our titles for download as PDFs. A few are already available free in that format and we will add to those, when we can, as we can. The next will be Stephen Brooke’s collection of fantasy short stories, ‘Lands Far Away.’ It was always intended that the digital version would be free (as are his poetry collections) with a print book available for purchase.

How soon we might make novels available in PDF form in our own store is uncertain. It will happen but may take some time to roll out and include all our titles. This will be part of the process of changing the distribution of all our e-books, as we are no longer going to use Lulu for that service. Essentially, EPUB and PDF will be available at our store at Lulu and as a few free titles at our site, and Kindle books may be purchased at Amazon. Of course, print will continue to be distributed ‘everywhere.’

Fifteenth Anniversary

This summer marks (in any meaningful sense) the fifteenth anniversary of Arachis Press. Yes, we used a different name the first two or three years. Yes, the first book was initially printed locally for sale at poetry readings, rather than going to the POD (via Lulu) approach we have used since. But 2018 does mark fifteen years since ‘Pieces of the Moon,’ the first chapbook of poetry by Stephen Brooke, was published.

So, it also marks the beginning of our publishing enterprise. We have learned a great deal in that time! Certainly, our books look better, are edited better, and so on (revised editions over the years have fixed many of the early mistakes). There was, admittedly, something of a gap between that first book and the second, the novel ‘The Middle of Nowhere,’ but we have published new books every year since.

We shall continue to do so. Primarily my own books (i.e. written or edited by Stephen Brooke), to be sure, though we are quite willing to publish work by others. That will be addressed eventually, not in this blog entry.

I have done a new, revised edition of that first book, to appear later this year. Many of our books could use a new round of editing and proofreading to address small problems. Nothing major in any of them, to be sure; I do not intend to rewrite anything!

And do expect three new titles to see publication yet this year, beginning with ‘Asanas’ on June 16.

Eggshell Boats Site

We finally have a 'true' website for our imprint, Eggshell Boats. We set up EB for publishing poetry, literary fiction, that sort of thing — essentially to keep all that separated a bit from the fantasy and adventure and children's books we also publish. It is at eggshellboats.com or at eggshellboats.insolentlad.com. Yes, it is a subdomain at Insolent Lad Media now, rather than just a page.

Somewhat bare-bones for the moment but we will update as we feel moved to do so. Before the first EB offering, the poetry collection VOYAGES appears, for sure. That is set for November 1, 2017. Most of our current poetry titles will be moved to Eggshell Boats, by the way.

Donzalo and More

We have nearly completed the revisions of our entire catalog, and should have all the new editions  up by the end of this month. The intention was then to work up a combined edition of 'Donzalo's Destiny,' including a hardcover version. However, this plan has been abandoned, at least for now.

This, in part, is because the 740 page, 206,000 words, plus illustrations, was a bit much. Best to keep the saga in its four separate books and move on to new projects. But we will attempt to edit those four books and get them into wider distribution (i.e. at B&N, Amazon, etc) along side our  ebook editions.

Indeed, we hope to do this with most of our print books, in time. We have always been leery of this approach because it adds unnecessary expense as the books pass through the hands of a middleman. We would rather you, the readers, save the money as we keep our prices down.

The first book we will attempt to submit to distribution will be Stephen Brooke's third poetry collection, RETELLINGS. If it works out well, more titles will join it. This will require varying amounts of reformatting, both internal and to the covers, to meet the requirements of the vendors. And all new titles will be set up with this in mind.

Or we may just keep on as we have!

2015

One of our goals for the coming year here at the Arachis Press is to release revised editions of many of our titles. Not surprisingly, we have found mistakes – mostly typographical – in some of the books and intend to remedy those.

Indeed, the only two completely error-free books (as far as we can tell) are the picture book, A MOUSE IS IN THE HOUSE, and the biography/art book, THE ART OF K. PAGE BROOKE. These will require no changes.

There may or may not be a revision of the beginners’ chapter book, THE CONTRARY FAIRY. We have found only one very small typo there, which has no effect on the story, so it might not be worth changing. We might release an ebook (EPUB and, probably, MOBI/Kindle) version — we originally felt it was not a suitable format but are reconsidering that decision.

At any rate, expect revisions of all the remaining titles over the course of 2015, beginning with our first poetry chapbook, PIECES OF THE MOON by Stephen Brooke. That’s ready to send to the printer right now.

Once all four books of DONZALO’S DESTINY are revised, we do intend to offer a combined print version, possibly including a hard-cover edition. Expect that before the coming year ends.

Of course, we do hope to offer new titles and that will receive priority over the work on the older books. What will those new titles be? Stay tuned and find out!

New Catalog, September 2013

The new and updated of our books is now available: http://insolentlad.com/files/apcat2013sep.pdf

All the titles are available at our store in print, and most as PDF and EPUB as well. Feel free to contact us with any questions.

Magazine

A quick announcement here that we are 'laying the foundations' of a new literary magazine (online and probably non-paying, at least at first) to be titled The Arachis Review. First issue may appear, perhaps, in early 2014 and we're thinking twice a year after that---as we did with the short-lived Peripheral Vision magazine.

There is a lot to think about and a lot to do before this magazine will happen. I will say that our emphasis (as with PV) may be towards a Stuckist/Remodernist tone. Or maybe not. At any rate, give some thought to work you might submit. We will be interested in reviews (we may start publishing them separately, first), essays, short fiction, poetry and all the other usual suspects for this sort of thing.

New Catalog

The March 2013 catalog of books from The Arachis Press is now available for download. It contains information on all six of our current titles.

http://insolentlad.com/files/apcat2013mar.pdf

Logo

I'm at a point where I want to make a more-or-less permanent decision on the logo for Arachis Press. Do I stick with my older concept I worked up a couple years ago (with or without added peanut graphic):

Or do I go with this more more unique choice:

I've pretty much narrowed it down to these two...and I like them both. The older one might come off as classy to some but it's also just a tad cheesy, don't you think? The newer design certainly makes for a clean and even forceful 'AP' but I'm not entirely enamored of the font otherwise.

Well, I suppose I'll decide soon, as I'm getting the web site revamped and expanded (at last) and would want to use one or the other. It would appear in the next book too, but then I already have five books out there with the older logo. That's probably the strongest argument for keeping it.

addendum, July 29: having given this some time for consideration (starting a couple months before posting it), I've decided to stick with the old logo.  So that's the Arachis Press 'brand' for the foreseeable future.