I read an article years ago (30 or so, I was still in high school) about 42-character text on the Spectrum which drew 6x8 characters instead of 8x8. You could do 40 col text with an 8 pixel border down each side, which might look quite nice.
Yes there were a few programs that used smaller characters to increase the amount of text that could be displayed upon the screen.
The first one that comes to mind is the text-editor "tasword" which allowed 64 characters per line, instead of the default 32:
Think of the learning lisp one game at a time. Or aima. These game missed me even though I am older than them. The problem is we start with Priated (pine)apple 2 and miss all the other machines in Hong Kong. Priate has its use.