Specimen Books of Metal & Wood Type

Until recently, books like these were accessible only in rare book rooms and private collections, but we can thank a variety of individual collectors, universities, libraries, museums, and other institutions for making their copies available for digitization and online viewing. Many are hosted at the Internet Archive, which provides reasonably good captures for web browsing or download. I often turn to these sources for research, writing, and consulting, and also for identifying and cataloging type at Fonts In Use.

The collection below began with a PDF compiled by Hans Reichardt of the Klingspor-Museum and expanded from there, drawing from my own research and from lists at Open Library, Typography.Guru, Jacques André’s Bibliothèque virtuelle de typographie, and Circuitous Root (whose founder, David M. MacMillan, contributed many of the specimen books available on the Internet Archive).

Although it will evolve as more books are found or published online, this list does not seek to be perfectly comprehensive. Nor does it include foundry ephemera, such as individual typeface specimens and promotions (you can find many of these by browsing typeface pages on Fonts In Use). The goal is to facilitate research by gathering in one place the major catalogs that show a range of a manufacturer’s offerings.

This first view of the database is a simple list arranged by foundry name and then chronological order (or a best guess if there is no official publication date). But there is much more metadata under the hood, and future editions of this page will offer sorting by other categories, such as year, or browsing by cover or title page.

Of course, no matter how hi-fi the digital capture, there is no substitute for thumbing through physical specimen books at actual size. Many libraries, research centers, and universities have typographic collections the public can visit, and they offer lots of titles that aren’t available online. Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Butler Library, Kemble Collection, Letterform Archive, Lubalin Center, New York Public Library, Plantin-Moretus Museum, San Francisco Public Library, Silver Buckle Press Collection, St Bride Library, and Wing Collection at the Newberry Library — to name just a few — are valuable resources that deserve our support. Go out into your community and do some digging. What you find may surprise you.  — Stephen Coles

@June 11, 2022 — Enabled alternate views! Now you can see books sorted by year published, by country, by digital host, or by date added to the database (which means we won’t need to include individual catalog additions to these release notes anymore — though you can join as a Patron if you want updates emailed to you every few months).

You can also narrow the list to books that feature wood type. Other sorts and filters will be added soon.

There is also a new beta view revealing all the properties in the database! This isn’t yet optimized for the public website, but you can peek at selected images, notes, page counts, tags, and other data.

@May 29, 2022 — Added 1958 Intertype and c.1951 Western Typesetting from Ohio State University (via HathiTrust).

@May 28, 2022 — Added 1856 Dickinson and c.1886 State Gazette from RIT.

@May 20, 2022 — Added 1898 Tsukiji (Thanks, Paul Shaw!) Our first Japanese catalog is dedicated to borders and ornaments, with several from MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan, including the Combination Chinese and Combination Japanese Border Series, Western pastiches of Asian decoration by journeyman punchcutter William W. Jackson.

@May 5, 2022 — Added c.1858 White, along with more info about this foundry that absorbed into Farmer.

@February 26, 2022 — Added five catalogs hosted by Art. Lebedev’s Bibliotekus, including three Cyrillic catalogs, 1912 Schelter & Giesecke, and a 1894 edition of Petzendorfer’s Schriften Atlas.

@February 14, 2022 — Added 1909 Générale/Beaudoire. (Thanks, Carine Vadet-Perrot!)

@February 5, 2022 — Added 1773 Enschedé. (Thanks, Matthijs Sluiter!)

@January 31, 2022 — Added Deberny & Peignot wood type specimen. (Thanks, Ampersand Press Lab!)

@January 7, 2022  —  Added 15 catalogs of wood type from Zvi Bregman, Hamilton, Line-O-Scribe, Morgans & Wilcox, Morgan Sign Machine, Wm. H. Page, and Showcard Machine. (Thanks to David Shields, who added these himself! If you would like to have editing permissions so you can contribute directly to the database, please get in touch.)

@December 31, 2021 — Added 5 catalogs from the State Library of Berlin, which is in the midst of a major type specimen digitization program along with the Deutsches Technikmuseum. (Thank you, Dan Reynolds!)

@November 9, 2021 — Added 2 catalogs from Plantin, 1567 and c.1585, now the earliest in the database. (Thank you, Matthijs Sluiter!)

@October 17, 2021 — Added UTMMC’s Universal Type Caster faces, c.1914

@October 17, 2021 — Added 4 catalogs from the Cary Collection at RIT. More from RIT to come.

@October 16, 2021 — Added 6 catalogs (all incomplete digitizations, but hi-fi) from Letterform Archive.