Nimrod is a great old stalwart. Paul Luna of the Oxford dictionaries loves it.
And as far as I'm concerned it looks weird at large sizes because it's a "real" text face!

Would you be interested in commissioning a display cut of Nimrod? That would really be ideal.
Otherwise try looking into Scotch faces that are narrow and have high stroke contrast.

hhp

I wonder how a subhead or display cut of Utopia would do? I've just been going back and looking at it lately because I bought the Utopia Opticals package for my dad (along with a bunch of other stuff). <http://store.adobe.com/type/browser/p/p_1415.jhtml>

Cheers,

T

- disclaimer: I work at Adobe, and this is one of our typefaces.

I'm not sure how it will get along with Syntax or Interstate, but Storm's Hercules is worth a look. It looks great big.

-Addison

(has it become necessary to put disclaimers at the bottoms of our posts now? i work at Linotype, but I like Adobe fonts, too)

Would you be interested in commissioning a display cut of Nimrod? That would really be ideal.
---------
Hehe, I wonder how much that would cost.... not that I could afford that anyway - our boss still thinks that serious investing in quality design is a futile thing to do - just curious.

Anyway, both Utopia and Hercules seem alluring, but I can afford only one of them. And with that comes another question: how do you determine if a textface is appropriate for a particular task, if you don't have a chance to see it set in a large text block together with other faces you intend to use? In my experience a test line of a font may seem rather good, but when I set it in the particular page, columns and all, for one reason or another it simply doesn't work. Is there a way to know it beforehand? Does this kind of knowing come with education or experience (I don't have much of either), with intricate knowledge about the letterforms? Or do we all just kind of make a 'blind shot' and see what we get?

PDF specimens (and a good laser printer) are absolutely necessary to judge a good text font.

I'm not sure where you can find a specimen of Utopia, but Storm's expert pages are great. Here's the text cuts of Hercules. Use the "Download this PDF" link in the upper right-hand corner.

Mr. Phinney may be able to point you to a Utopia PDF.

-Addison