![]() ![]() Why does anyone bother with it now? Or, as Claudio suggest, does it matter at all? As a designer and compositor of intensely text-heavy books, I tend to ignore such designations. The term “Book,” therefore, became so compromised and misleading that one had little idea what it meant. ![]() If what they offered was seriously flawed (such as in not having true text weights), people bought it anyway. It should be remembered that, at that time, ITC was far and away the main source for type designs, licensed by all of the machine manufacturers. I learned from people who worked at ITC that unfortunate or not, the company was determined to squeeze at least four weightings from everything they released, solely for the purposing of enhancing revenue. This unfortunate weighting became common amongst many ITC offerings. The Book seemed to have been created more for headline use, or at least for larger subheads. What I found perplexing about this weighting system was that the Book weight was, in my opinion, almost always too light for most book texts and the Medium was too heavy. The letterforms were based on Goudy’s University of California Old Style. Like most ITC types, Berkeley Oldstyle was an eight-weight family: Book, Medium, Bold, and Black in both roman and italic. ![]() My earliest recollection of a “Book” weight was in the release of Tony Stan’s Berkeley Oldstyle by ITC, in 1983. ![]()
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