The perfect simile to explain a thorny issue about type history to people who are familiar with fonts as things they pick from a list:
…there can never be a definitive Bodoni, Garamond, Jenson, or Fleischmann typeface, as their oeuvres consist of a multitude of single, size-specific fonts. It is like mashing up Othello, King Lear, Hamlet and a touch of The Tempest and publishing it as ‘The Shakespeare’.
Kris Sowersby, posting at I Love Typography