It's a lot of work and you would be the only one licensing it.

you would be the only one licensing it

I doubt that.

I'm sure there's more than one person who has licensed Storm's Walbaum, Shinn's Scotch, Preuß's Prillwitz, ITC Bodoni, Ingeborg, Miller or any other of the fine (re)incarnations of classicist typefaces available today.

Start learning Fontlab.

I agree, very nice.

Nils,

being a Didot-obsessed too (albeit more on the "first manner" punches cut by Vafflard around 1780), I agree that a contemporary rendition of a Didot-text type would be useful. In the meantime, the digital type that resembles most your sample seems to be Fayon:

https://ourtype.com/#/try/fayon/

Series Nº 27 (Neo Didot) had a Cyrillic (‘Russian’) version. I don’t know when it was developed. A lot of books in USSR and world-wide were set in Neo Didot.

The picture above comes from a Russian edition of Camille Flammarion’s Petite astronomie published in Berlin in 1922 (it was printed at Spamer Druckerei, in Leipzig).

Nicola, thanks for the link to Fayon. I've been to OurType's site recently but managed to miss it. Gorgeous!

H&FJ's "6pt" Didot might fit the bill.

Applying a stroke value in InDesign/Quark will reduce contrast.

...or ITC Bodoni 6 or 12, both designed for use at text sizes.

thanks everyone for your replies! Fayon looks great indeed; I particularly love its italics. As for New Standard -- this just how invaluable a few real people's advice is, compared to WhatTheFont, which didn't come up with New Standard even though it's in MyFonts' database. I'll go check out that Lenin edition you mentioned; I'm sure there's a few copies in Berlin's libraries...

ITC Bodoni has been a long-time favorite of mine; in its category, it's probably the most accessible and reader-friendly face I've worked with so far.

@Nick: I'm glad to hear »stroke value« mentioned by a pro, as I've always thought this is only what non-pros do (hoping to emulate good old ink squash). So I never even tried it, as I'm a non-pro myself, trying to avoid anything that's only done by non-pros :) ...are you suggesting this is a serious option, or even a standard procedure in book production? Same goes for the artificial »bold« feature found in font editors. Of course one could apply a tiny (vertical) bit of it, to fatten up the hairlines, but I can't imagine the results to look anything but awful -- I might be wrong though; maybe I'm just too old-fashioned...

Nils, I believe one should trust the judgement of one's own eyes, and experiment rather than operate blindly on someone else's principle, even if it is commonly held.

I first used the Stroke feature to strengthen type when creating small caps in InD and Quark, for typefaces where there were none.
I combined it with adjustments to tracking and horizontal scaling.

Cheating has been going on in typography for aeons: shaving metal type to squeeze in justification, for instance.

I'm wary of faux bold, a little bit is OK, but the more it's used, the more "cleaning up" that needs to be done afterwards..

"Stroke" is the basis of how type designers make "grades" and optical sizes.

Speaking of Monotype faces which were never digitized, what about reviving Emerson ?

Stéphane — cf. http://typophile.com/node/54510#comment-327625

Wow, I hadn’t seen this one — thanks, Kent.