Garamond is a gorgeous font and one I have loved for a long long time.
It has a magnificent italic ampersand, and back in my mac days, I recall it having some lovely ornaments I was fond of using on the title pages of essays.
Pascal has posted on garamond.
An interesting read for closet typogeeks like me.
Is there a true free garamond (or jannon) out there? By free I mean free as in freedom.
As Andy Fitzsimon once said in a tutorial - the open source community doesn't give font development enough hate - there are not enough free fonts out there... with truly free licenses. Fonts are hard work. Really hard work. So those that we do have are wonderful and fantabulous, and I am deeply deeply respectful and grateful to those who have made them, and set them free - but we need more. Kudos to redhat for giving us the liberation fonts. I also have to mention Gentium - a typeface for all nations.
Free Fonts.
If this sounds like something you think might be important and what to know more...
Read this: http://www.designwritingresearch.org/free_fonts.html
We have a free software tool called FontForge and raph levien's spiro stuff is very cool and currently experimental in dev versions of inkscape, and inkscape is working on SVG font foo... but as a key element of design and printing... well we just need more fonts.
Brianna - I may just have stumbled on a talk idea for your mini-conf.