Free fonts similar to Baskerville

The alternatives in detail

How to recognize Baskerville

John Baskerville, Birmingham, 1750s, with punches cut by John Handy. Today’s digital versions are revivals by Monotype, ITC, Bitstream, URW and others.

• The uppercase Q has a long, sweeping tail.
• The lower loop of the lowercase g is left open.
• Crisp contrast with sharp, tapered serifs and generous, round proportions.

In a site’s CSS it may appear as Baskerville Old Face, ITC New Baskerville, Monotype Baskerville, Baskerville URW, Baskerville BT. Not sure what you are looking at? Identify the font on the live page first.

Is Baskerville free?

Depends on the version. A Baskerville ships with macOS, and Baskerville Old Face comes with Microsoft Office, but neither can be served as a web font without a license. Several commercial versions are included with Adobe Fonts. Windows itself has no Baskerville, so those visitors see a fallback.

The alternatives on this page are open source, so you can use them on commercial sites, self-host the files and ship them in products. Read more in font licensing in plain English.

Use Libre Baskerville in your CSS

Put the free font first and keep sensible fallbacks behind it. Self-hosting the files is the most private and usually the fastest option.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Libre Baskerville";
  src: url("/fonts/libre-baskerville-400.woff2") format("woff2");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Libre Baskerville";
  src: url("/fonts/libre-baskerville-700.woff2") format("woff2");
  font-weight: 700;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Libre Baskerville", Baskerville, "Baskerville Old Face", Georgia, serif;
}