A morte de Ivan Ilitch e outras histórias by Leo Tolstoy, Editora Martin Claret
This Portuguese edition of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories was published in 2018 by Brazilian publisher Martin Claret, featuring a layout by Giovana Gatti Quadrotti with art direction by José Duarte de Castro (to be complete, the editorial production was handled by by Carolina Marani Lima and Mayara Zucheli).
The book caught my eye a while ago for using certain elegant graphic solutions, but making a dubious typographic choice for the body text.
Note that the font used in the body text is Orpheus, which is commonly regarded as a display font. The sans serif – which never appears in uppercase – is LL Replica.
The problem with using Orpheus in body text is that, for example in footnotes, the font becomes very fragile – especially on the intertitle pages, when the color of the page is a not-too-dark orange and the text is in white (see the second headline image). There are two aspects to the folio: on the even-numbered pages, LL Replica is used in a dark color (black); on the odd-numbered pages, the title of the novel in question is the same color as the orange used for the rest of the book, a choice that again does not make the text legible, especially at a small size.
Headline from the intertitle page
On the first page of the first novel, text is set in a larger font size than on the following pages
4 Comments on “A morte de Ivan Ilitch e outras histórias by Leo Tolstoy, Editora Martin Claret”
Thank you, Rodrigo. Your analysis is spot on.
It’s not that Orpheus is only meant for large sizes per se. The Klingspor foundry had it cut in sizes as small as 6pt. (The full range spanned fifteen sizes: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20, 24, 28, 36, 48, 60 pt; plus all-caps fonts in 60 and 72 pt.) You can compare twelve sizes from 6 to 48pt on this index card. Smaller ones are sturdier, with less delicate hairlines. This is at least in part due to the ink spread in letterpress printing – something the punchcutters took into account in their work. Also, the spacing is more open.
Canada Type’s digital Orpheus Pro – which is the font used here – can indeed only really shine in display applications. It’s apparently based on a larger size of the metal original.
Now one could use its Medium weight to add a bit more heft to the page, and increase the tracking a notch. However, the issue of very fine hairlines remains – and is even intensified with modern printing methods where there’s no physical type and hence no ink spread. This leads to the flickering text you described as problematic. In the scientific words of Mugikura & Ahrens, the spatial frequency is too high. In order to use digital Orpheus for running text, one would need proper optical sizes.
Canada Type added extra weights, Condensed styles, larger language support and all kinds of alternate glyphs to Orpheus Pro – which can come in handy in the intended display applications. But optical sizes are not among its features.
Wow, I’m impressed with the fountain matrix! I didn’t know it had been produced in so many sizes. In fact, as you said, the problem is due to the printing medium. A curiosity: you mentioned that CanadaType has added greater language support, but I believe that the version used in the edition of the book did not have such support (at least, not with the Cyrillic alphabet). See this footnote: the Cyrillic text is probably Times New Roman.
Right, “greater language support” is very much relative: what I meant is that the digital version supports more languages than Klingspor’s metal version did (which isn’t hard). I don’t know which languages Orpheus Pro supports exactly – the Canada Type website is sparse with information, and only mentions “extended Latin-based language support”. You can view the glyph set at Type Network.
The fact that the text contains Cyrillic – even if it’s just one footnote – would have been another reason to find a different font for the book design.
I like the filters offered by Fontstand. With a few clicks, it gives me several options for seriffed typefaces suitable for body copy with support for Portuguese and Russian – for example.