Maybe because I’m a bit of a bibliophile, but I always had a soft spot for old typefaces, used in printed publications since the Fifteenth Century. Imagine my amazement when, browsing the excellent MyFonts site, I discovered the vast collection of typefaces by Gilles Le Corre. All fonts are offered with a personal or commercial license, and are quite affordable. Some of the most interesting include historical versions of widely known typefaces such as Garamond, Baskerville, Caslon, Modern and Copperplate. If you’re fascinated by old books, historical documents and the history of printing, you’ll love Le Corre’s work.

From his profile on MyFonts:

Beginning in 2007 he has been trying to reproduce, very exactly, a wide range of historic European typefaces, mainly from medieval and early periods of printing — his favorite period — from 1456 with Gutenberg, up to 1913 with a font inspired by a real old typewriter.

All his fonts are based on historical research, identifying whenever possible printers and punch cutters, cities and countries, that represent a time and style. Often, they are “eroded”, an aesthetic choice because old printed texts have this rough and imperfect appearance. 

The punctuation signs of the time (mainly , ; . : — / | ( ) ’ ” ? and ! when available) are always respected as they were in contemporary documents. Every font is completed with arabic numbers, accented characters and any missing characters (such as the W and K which were not used in French medieval books or Latin texts, for exemple), plus any others of which no original instance can be found, along with typical ligatures, abbreviated letters, and final or initial characters […]

Here are some samples: