As the interior designer for Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before, one of my biggest challenges was choosing a font for the book. The obvious first requirement is a font that reads well in large blocks at a small size. With that in mind, I started by collecting a list of fonts that felt stylistically appropriate for the voice and subject matter of Karelia’s book. I fell in love with Caecilia and the way its easy curves and slab serifs felt strong without seeming stodgy.
But when I did a test run and set a chapter in Caecilia, I found that it didn’t move well when I adjusted tracking, which would make it difficult to fix widows and orphans when laying out the interior. So I crossed that off my list and moved on.
My next choice was Cantoria, which flows beautifully but still manages to feel a bit edgy and daring with its spur serifs and diamond-shaped tittles.
It felt appropriate for a book about a girl who wears combat boots as well as elegant floor-length skirts, and it felt appropriate for her story. I was extremely excited to use Cantoria because it was designed in 1986, and thus fits nicely with the timeline of the book. After checking that I liked its italic and that it contained the necessary accented glyphs for the French and Spanish words that pop up occasionally in the book’s dialogues, I made my official decision to use Cantoria for Forgive Me If I’ve Told You This Before‘s interior.