my kingdom for fonts!

ARGH. My laptop comes with a very limited number of fonts, most of them looking more or less the same. And I have a crappy version of Photoshop Lite that doesn't let me do much, but that's a rant for another time. What matters NOW is that I'm designing the poster for the play I'm in, and the director has a very specific idea of what she wants the font to look like. I asked her to sketch it out for me. She did. "Oh!" says I. "That's like Herculanum!" Because, you see, my knowledge of fonts is reasonably extensive, what with my father being a renderer and having all the fancy design stuff on our home computers, plus having myself spent the past summer designing a lot of the advertising for a small theater. "No problem!" I add. "I don't have that font installed, but I'm sure I can download it somewhere!"

FOOL that I am, because apparently this particular font costs upwards of 22 euro to download. And I'd be willing to just find a similar font on one of the many free font sites, but that would involve scrolling through several thousands of fonts, because they are all sorted by their own random-ass names, and a free font that looks like Herculanum may well be called "Joe's Kitchen" for all I know.

So. My friends. I am in need of your help. Where, oh where, can I find this font for free? Or where can I find similar fonts? Or a nice big PACKAGE of fonts? Because my laptop doesn't currently have anything more elaborate than Courier New, and this is a truly tragic state of affairs.