Oldstyle types are easiest to read in print. On screens with curved surfaces, sans serif fonts are easiest to read.

Is that your final answer?

(jk, thanks for the help)

Chiseling crisp corners into stone weakened the corners. Serifs eased the corners making them less vulnerable to weathering, accidents, and vandalism. Some typologists theorize that thousands of years of habit has made serif fonts preferable, others that letters with serifs conform to the Golden Ratio and are therefore naturally aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Zero, you probably think you've asked a simple question, but it might not be. Are you asking because you're working on something? If you're asking because of a project rather than idle curiosity, then understanding your project would help us give advice.

So what's the reason for the question? Are you going to self-publish a book? Create a proposal? Will it be in Word or Pages? Will you make a PDF? Is it for the Web? Do you need free? Do you need something that's already installed on your system, or would it be okay to download something? Are you using a Mac or a PC? Do you use foreign characters and symbols? Is this something for you and maybe some close friends, or something you'd like to give a wider audience? How long is the text? Will you need headlines and subheads? Very basic, yes-no style answers to these questions would help.

I don't know that there's a "typical" font (typeface, really) for books to be published in. Most designers would tell you that you should choose a typeface that suits the text. Many copyright pages don't tell you what typeface they're set in, but among those that do there's a really wide variance. Saying "It's Times New Roman" understates the variety and, IMHO, misstates the reality of the situation.

If you're trying to do something yourself, I'd need to know more before giving you real advice; however, as a sweeping generalization I'd say that online texts should use a sans-serif body text, while printed material should use a serifed body text. Headlines could be serifed or unserifed, but often headlines are in a contrasting typeface (e.g., Verdana (sans-serif) text with Garamond (serif) headlines).

Caslon is good and was once ubiquitous, but now it seems a little old: I do our older "Classic Flash" pieces in it because I want that old-style feel. Garamond variants are always popular, and although they have a classic look most of them don't look dated. Bodoni is often considered elegant, with its high contrast between thick and thin, though I don't personally like it. I think the Wall Street Journal's masthead is a Bodoni. Minion (considered in more detail below) is an excellent typeface for printed body text.

All of these are serifed faces: they'll look better at print resolution than at screen resolution. That's the reason for using sans-serif on computers; it has nothing really to do with curved vs. flat screens. Average screens struggle to hold the visual detail needed to render a serif well. That said, if you're working with graphics, Flash animation, or something similar, the computer may smooth the text, which might be effective: your mileage may vary.

If your text is relatively short or will be displayed on-screen, you might consider sans-serif faces for your main text: Univers, Helvetica (which is still excellent even though it's a little too common for some people's taste), Frutiger; Myriad (detailed in a moment); or go download the lovely and free Fontin Sans (which is what I use for most of my PDFs at Flash Fiction Online).

No, nobody who knows anything and has a choice uses Arial. It's an ugly, misshapen knockoff of Helvetica. This is typical of designers' attitudes towards it.

The four "c" fonts -- Calibri, Cambria, Candara, and Consolas -- are all typefaces that get installed with Office 2007. That's why you've only seen Calibri in Word. They're all pretty good faces and won't embarass you at all.

If your work is going online, you won't have all these great options I just mentioned. You'll have Verdana, Times, Georgia, Arial, etc., and frankly the typographic situation is somewhat impoverished.

If you have a choice, I would generally recommend *against* Times (Mac) and Times New Roman (Windows), for two reasons.

First, because it's *everywhere*, which makes it seem stale compared to your other options. It's a little like Yogi Berra saying, "That place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore," but it's true. If you want a fresh feeling to your book, it's best not to set it in a tired font.

Second, because lots of designers hate it. Given a choice, most real designers will choose something else. One piece of evidence for that is the articles that talk about "taking back Times Roman" -- they always start with something like, "Yes, we know you hate Times, but it's everywhere on the Web, and it's really not as bad as all _that_..." Not that you have to cow-tow to designers, but if you're doing something important, isn't it nice not to have people say, "Too bad the guy used a crappy typeface." That's more likely to happen with Times than with, say, Garamond or even New Century Schoolbook.

Times does see some use in places where its "economy" is helpful -- that's the number of words you can fit on a line, as TaleSpinner pointed out. Yes, it's a little bit condensed, which makes it good for mass-market economy is important. But if you're doing something special, you probably don't want to look like a pulp. Give your text a little breathing room.

If you do need that economy, I'd prefer Minion, a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach. You can see what it looks like in print by looking at a copy of "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst -- most of the copy in that book is set in Minion, if I recall correctly, and you should be able to get a look at it through your local library or decent bookstore.

If you have Adobe Acrobat Reader running on Windows, you can find the files for Minion here:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 8.0\Resource\Font
...along with Myriad, which I mentioned before and which is eminently worth having. Just drag the MyriadPro and MinionPro .otf files into your \windows\fonts directory. (You have to do this with Explorer. It won't work from DOS.)

Now, here's the issue: if you're creating a PDF, these fonts should embed nicely. But if your final product is going to be a Word document or an HTML page, and the other person doesn't have these fonts installed, they probably won't see your font. Unless you engage in some technical trickery (embedded fonts in Word, sIFR on the Web) they'll probably see a G-d-awful substitute that will make your page look terrible. So only do this if you control the final output.

First of all, thank you very much for the detailed reply.

I'm going to print my own manuscript for my friends to read (who are hard people to get to read anything anyway) and I want to make the experience as painless as possible.

It's on a PC but I don't think that matters since I can download any recommended font. Also the story is completely in english with no strange characters or accents. Just basic type. And it's 120,000 words long.

And I always make into a pdf just before I print the whole project.

If you want to see the most common fonts across various systems, go to http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-WindowsResults.shtml

If you're creating a PDF you can use whatever face you want; and it's a lot of words, so you'd like something economical. To keep it simple I'd say this: go find the Minion typeface I mentioned, install it, and set the entire thing in that. It'll look relatively fresh, the page count will be a little lower without the text being squished, and for this application that's 99% of what you have to worry about.

Certainly for friends, it would be acceptable. Give it a look. (though I don't know how common it is on the Mac, since I use PC...)