I’ve always had a soft spot for Baskerville, even though I haven’t used it in years. For the first three months of my design program, we were allowed to use only five typefaces: Helvetica, Avant Garde, Palatino, Garamond, and Baskerville. I’ll need to download and play around with this new Baskerville version.
This is genuinely exciting, and it’s the kind of revival project worth paying attention to. A lot of so-called revivals are just loose redraws of a scan someone found, but when the research goes back to original punches and period impressions, you get letterforms that actually reflect how the type was intended to work at size — the proportions, the contrast, the spacing rhythms. That’s a different thing entirely from a digitization built on top of a previous digitization.
Baskerville is one of those faces that rewards being set with a little care. Its x-height runs small and the hairlines are delicate, so for body text I find it sings when set a touch larger than you might default to, with a bit of breathing room in the leading — it opens up beautifully in long-form editorial work, book typography, and anything with a literary register. And don’t sleep on the italic; Baskerville’s italic has a calligraphic elegance that a lot of modern workhorse serifs have flattened out of existence, which makes it lovely for pull quotes and display touches.
@Just-B, if it’s been years since you last used it, a revival this careful might be the excuse to revisit it. Faces like this don’t go out of style so much as they wait for the right project.