The name of Book Antiqua suggests its nature: it’s a 20th-century typeface with its roots in much older styles, and it feels right at home in books. Book Antiqua is well suited to reading, so it works well as a text typeface, whether in reports and long documents or in the text of a flyer or a slide. It has a bit of calligraphic panache in its details, especially in the italic, and a bit of the look of having been chiseled out in stone. It can look both modern and traditional at the same time.
Book Antiqua is a serif text typeface with an open, round feel but a slightly square shape to round letters such as ‘O’. When set in all capital letters, it can look quite distinguished. Its italic shows a distinct angularity, as though written quickly but carefully with a flat-tipped pen.
Book Antiqua is based on the well-known typeface Palatino, which calligrapher and type designer Hermann Zapf created in metal in the 1950s.
