When it comes to typography, there are people who like to mess around with fonts (I plead guilty as charged) and then there are people who are obsessed with fonts . . . and those people can get just plain weird.
Consider the case of the Doves typeface, created in the late 1800’s for the Doves Press, a small press associated (like William Morris’s Kelmscott Press) with the Arts and Crafts Movement. The typeface’s creator, after a falling-out with his business partner, dumped all of the type — and the matrices for casting more — into the Thames River, in an effort to insure that no other press would ever use them. A century later, a digital font designer spent three years working from copies of existing books in the Doves typeface, re-creating the font in digital form.
It’s a fascinating story; you can read the whole thing here.
Dr. Doyle's Blog 
That is deliciously geeky!