Body-text fonts, pt. 37: Bembo

(I agree with C. S. Lewis here – enthusiastically – insofar as languages make genuine or at least plausible distinctions. But what if, e.g., loving just is liking? Probably not; but the point is, languages might (a) encode different ontologies or inventories of acceptable concepts rather than (b) differ in expressive facility.

Anyway.)

Bembo is one of the oldest and greatest fonts. It’s common in books but less so in desktop publishing. I believe some text editing programs provide Bembo; if yours doesn’t, consider obtaining one of these free variants of the typeface:

(1) Borgia Pro (a clone of this standard version of Bembo, with gratis regular, italic, bold, and bold italic font files);

(2) Cardo (in Google Docs);

(3) fbb (an enhancement of Cardo);

and (4) XETBook (rather like Bembo Book).

Cardo/fbb is the closest thing to the above sample from Lewis. It’s not bad: I see it in some professionally typeset books, e.g. this book requiring lots of extra glyphs for the author’s (Nigerian) name. Tonight I learned that fbb has added a “swashed” Q to its character set. I once wrote a thirty-page research paper with Cardo, using Google Docs (which I don’t recommend for a paper of that length). The typesetting was arduous but, ultimately, successful; the paper wasn’t.