There are two ways to increase economy of italic which is to say the amount of contained on a page Using a narrow face and saving horizontal space More characters on each line. Using a wider face in a smaller size to save vertical space More lines on each page. horizontal-rule If you want to set your really italic small one face you might consider is Minuscule which is actually a family consisting of 5 faces Minuscule Six Minuscule Cinq Minuscule Quatre Minuscule Trois Minuscule Deux Have a look at a specimen of all six faces here As you can see while the proportions of the first two faces are fairly narrow starting with Minuscule Quatre the face bes quite a bit wider the x- italic board_item board_item_id 3737392 increases and the letter forms be increasingly robust and simplified. By Minuscule Deux looks really wacky The reason why this face looks so strange is that it has been designed to be used at 2 pt (!)hence the name Deux. To be honest though in the PDF file I cannot read smaller than 3 pt but perhaps this is a rendering issue and the face will be more readable in print. But if setting your at 2 pt is too ridiculous (it is) then Miniscule Six set at 6 pt will probably do the job horizontal-rule Don do it But while you will certainly save page count by setting your at 6 pt no one is going to read the book unless perhaps you provide a magnifying glass to go along with it. Of course you can always save page count by increasing page size too. Use 6 pt and a large sheet of paper and you just might fit your book onto a single page. Lots of pages saved. horizontal-rule Optical sizes I don think setting your small is a great practice to save pages but certainly if you use faces optimized for small you can probably get away with 9 pt or so. One thing to keep an eye on are so-called optical sizes which are fonts that are designed for specific sizes or size ranges. There are Poster Text above 36 pt used for posters. Display Large headings and titles above 24 pt. Subhead Short phrases between 14324 pt. Body Ideal reading sizes of 11314 pt. Small Text at small sizes of 8311 pt. Caption Legibility at between 638 pt. One excellent face is Freight Text s which as the name suggests is intended for size (1312 pt). There are also Freight Display s and Freight Big Pro s (poster size). But what might interest the leprechaun typographers among us is Freight Micro s which is designed to be used at 9 pt or smaller. Typefaces that include caption are among others Arno Pro s Brioso Pro s Chaparral Pro s Garamond Premier Pro s Adobe Jenson Pro s Kepler s Lapture s Minion s Tramuntana 1 Pro s Kepler even features a Caption Semicondensed s in several weights although judging from the 1 pt preview on MyFonts horizontal-rule Sans-serif When ites to horizontal space in typography one could argue serifs only get in the way as they unnecessarily using space. Without them characters can get more narrow and can be spaced more tightly in principle (though spacing your too tight at size will undermine the reading experience). A narrow and particularly legible face is Meta s (there is also a serif variant Meta s ). For more information on sans-serif faces for books read this post Sans-serif faces for books board_item board_item_id 3891887