I tried both suggestions, and I'm afraid they didn't work.  That is, I used the 
attached patch and ran "emacs -Q -r -font 
-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--0-0-75-75-c-0-iso8859-1", and Emacs 
displayed U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK using 
x:-unknown-Symbola-normal-normal-semicondensed-*-13-*-*-*-*-0-iso10646-1 
(#x394), which is almost unreadable compared to the old way which displayed it 
using x:-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1 (#x2018).