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unknown

I can only speak for the reason why I didn't try to answer.

It sounded like any answer we could give would be nothing more than subjective opinion. Who knows what your idea of a 'true' Baskervillian font would be? You said you were already familiar with most of the Baskervilles out there and found them lacking.

This is the Type Identification Board, where we see a picture of some type and try to identify it.

There are other forums at Typophile that are more along the philosophizing lines your question seems to want to go. It might have been better to post it on one of those forums, although we have had our share of philosophizing here, goodness knows.

Your criteria seemed much better defined in your mind than they were likely to be in mine, and with Baskerville dead, who could give the 'right' answer?

I would have said Fry's Baskerville, because I am not sure that Baskerville originally had an Italic face. But that's me.

unknown

OK, I'll bite:
For what it's worth, I like Storm's Baskerville.

unknown

If one of the things you were looking for is 'authentic' Baskerville, that should be found in the one John just mentioned. In his description of the font in the "Indie Fonts 2" book, Franta Storm says: "Until recently, the story of this typeface ended with mediocre digital versions, which did not get at the root of its inspiration. We selected as the most successful models for the digitization of this typeface its Roman and italics in the size of about today's 14 points, which Baskerville used for the printing, among other things, of his folio Bible in 1763, and Vergil's works in Latin in 1757."

Yet he also states later in the same commentary: "Even creators of genius, however, make mistakes, sometimes, and, therefore, in spite of the fact that we officially speak about 'a transcription, ' what was involved in the case of all complementary designs was a fairly fundamental reworking. Our aim was not so much to be reverently faithful to the original, as to preserve the spirit of the typeface and breathe new life into it."

So there you have it, faithful, but reworked.

Isn't the point really whether you like it? This is not a question with a right answer. If you like it, and if your client likes it, who else do you want to please?

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