Alice pretty well nailed it.

Plus consider that Georgia was specifically designed to work in very small sizes - mainly on screens where it renders sensibly even when there aren't many dots per character.

Good contrast between foreground and background is essential, dark on light is better than light on dark (and easier to print) and if you must have a graphic in the background, make it light, low contrast and defocused, even if you just alter the area around the text to be like that.

Jack's experiment is interesting. Palatino is a nice font.

Anahata