Excerpt from page 13 - Tea Sandwiches

You will find a wide assortment of ideas for tea sandwiches among these recipes. For each of them, start with dense, high-quality bread - white, whole wheat, pumpernickel, and rye all work well. If you're serving several kinds of sandwiches, use different breads for an attractive presentation. The best bread for tea sandwiches is thinly sliced. Bakeries can often slice whole loaves thinly, and in the supermarket, so-called diet bread is often thin-sliced, as are the smaller loaves meant for party canapes.
Then, except where the filling is itself a type of butter, spread the bread very thinly with softened butter. If you make the sandwiches ahead, this keeps the filling from making the bread soggy.

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