I wouldn't make a decision to adopt a casebook based on its typeface, but I do notice it — along with color and weight of the paper. Stephen Coles, who blogs at Typographica, reported here on the "Top Ten Typefaces Used by Book Design Winners." For the enquiring mind, they are:
Minion:
FF Scala:
FF Scala Sans:
Adobe Garmond:
Trade Gothic:
Electra:
Fournier:
Dante:
Din:
My co-authors Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore) and Joseph Dodge (Florida State) and I are putting some finishing touches on a Teacher's Manual for a new casebook. The publisher decides the font for the casebook, but has no preference for the font we use in the Teacher's Manual.
Looking at samples, there does not seem to be a strong convention of conforming font used in the casebook to font used in the Teacher's Manual. Does anyone have an opinion? (Yes, I am procrastinating ….)
Georgia works quite nicely, for both our IP Survey casebook and teacher's manual. (Loren & Miller, with Semaphore Press).
I like Garamond above (and myself use Book Antiqua for my Word docs.).
And welcome to the Lounge!
I used Minion (i.e., Adobe Minion Pro) for a recent teacher's manual and have been very happy with it. It looks much better, and is more readable, than Times or Times New Roman, but it doesn't draw attention to itself through eccentricities. And the italic is less slanted than the italic for Garamond.
(BTW, the casebook was set in Century Schoolbook, which is standard for Foundation Press.)
On a different but related issue – for student handouts (and for my own teaching notes) I have switched from Arial to Century Gothic after reading about universities that have saved thousands of dollars on the cost of ink with more eco-friendly fonts.