My first attempt to make something ... beautiful?

Without trying to imitate any particular book or style, I tried to evoke the beauty of ancient publications (very far from the illuminated books of he Middle Ages with Gothic or Uncial fonts, which are difficult to read for modern people).

The idea was add only add some fourier-orns ornaments, color, lettrine s and old style numbers (except in math mode) once so popular. The type font is Palatino, that looks old but not strange for people (who mostly will be not aware that is not the usual Times Roman). There are not ligatures nor random small missplacing of old printing presses, but protrusion and expansion of the microtype package help in recreate slight imperfections preventing printing characters always with exactly the same size. Paper is artificially aged with wallpaper package with a simple backgroud.

The two sample pages below (with nonsense dummy text, biologist please ignore the content) have been joined by the inner margins with Gimp, to simulate their appearance in a paper book.

Edit: I planned to post the code when it was more polished and it could be used as book template... But I never have time to do it, so as requested, here it is, as is. In graphicx package have been included the [demo] option and \TileWallPaper has been commented to make it compilable without images.