Type Specimens

Type Specimens includes 1. an ongoing synopsis of type specimens that have been digitized and posted online; and 2. posts about various aspects—historical, aesthetic, textual, socio-political, etc.—of specific type specimens in libraries, archives, and online.

Demonology & | witchcraft!!! | Printing: An online research session into the history of Philadelphia type foundries 1823–1844

Six Lines Gothic Condensed and Six Lines Gothic from Specimen of Printing Types and Ornaments by Rob & Ecklin, Letter Founders (Philadelphia: 1836). Image courtesy of RIT Libraries Digital Collections.
Letterforms Study Group via Zoom / Friday April 7 at 2 pm Eastern Daylight Time
fee $15

In this online type history research session I will retrace my recent research into the history of the Robb & Ecklin type foundry of Philadelphia, its partners Samuel Ecklin and Alexander Robb, and their relationship to …
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Blue Pencil no. 68—Specimens of Wood Type 1900–2000

This is part of a series of posts listing type specimens that have been digitized and placed online. Many of them are downloadable in whole or as individual pages. This is the second part of a list that focuses on specimens of wood type. It includes not only specimens from wood type manufacturers, but also specimens from type foundries that offer either wood type or large sizes of some of their metal types in wood. [1] The first part of …
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Blue Pencil no. 67—Specimens of Wood Type 1803–1899

This is part of a series of posts listing type specimens that have been digitized and placed online. Many of them are downloadable in whole or as individual pages. This is the first part of a list that focuses on specimens of wood type. It includes not only specimens from wood type manufacturers, but also specimens from type foundries that offer either wood type or large sizes of some of their metal types in wood. [1] The second part of …
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Mad, Bad (but Good to Know): A survey of type specimens offline and online

Sonoma Plaza (Bear Flag Republic) from Historia: A Type Specimen (Berkeley, California: Emigre Fonts, 2010), pp. 20–21. Design by Rudy VanderLans.
Mad, Bad (but Good to Know): A survey of type specimens offline and online
Type@Cooper
13 February 2023
This is a list of the type specimens included in my Type@Cooper talk. Those that have been digitized and available online are marked in red. Where multiple digitized versions of specimens exist I have chosen either the one with the best visual quality or one …
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Blue Pencil no. 66—James Mosley on the dating of several Imprimerie Royale type specimens

The authenticity of the date given for Épreuve d’un Nouveau Caractere pour l’Imprimerie Royale (Paris: Gravé par Alexandre, [1712]) in my list of type specimens from 1700 to 1769 (Blue Pencil no. 62) is considered spurious by type historian James Mosley. He wrote about it (and several other specimens of the romain du roi with questionable dates) in an article published by a French bibliophile society in 2002. Excerpts from a 2008 PDF version of Mosley’s article, which he …
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Addendum to Blue Pencil no. 61—a missing type specimen

Blue Pencil no. 61 Type Specimens 1486 to 1704 is a list of type specimens that have been digitized and made available online. It is not an attempt to list all known surviving type specimens. However, there is one undigitized specimen from this time frame that deserves to be mentioned since it was once part of the Gustav Mori collection whose contents have been digitized by the Goethe Universität. Riccardo Olocco called my attention to it. Here is what …
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Letterforms Study Group—Inaugural session 29 November 2022: Wood Type

Second page of chromatic borders from Specimens of Printing Types, Etc. Cast and Made by George Bruce, New York (New York: Bruce’s New-York Type-Foundry, 1853). Copy in the Grolier Club Library.
In early October I was at the Grolier Club in New York looking at a miscellany of type-related items in their collection: a birthday greeting to Margherita Bodoni in 1813; an 1827 book published by William Pickering “printed with the types of John Baskerville”; several publications issued by …
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Blue Pencil no. 64—Type Specimens from 1800 to 1836

This is the fourth in a series of posts listing type specimens that have been digitized and placed online. Many of them are downloadable in whole or as individual pages. A few items listed are not type specimens, but books that show important typefaces in use.
N.B. Several of the St. Bride Library type specimens available at the Internet Archive have fold-out pages or inserted items which do not appear in the regular viewer or in the PDF downloads. To access …
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Online Type Specimens at St. Bride Library—Fold-outs

In digitizing their pre-1831 type specimen books St. Bride Library in London—arguably the preeminent repository of material on the history of type—was unable to fit some elements of the books into the Internet Archive format. Various fold-outs and inserted items had to be placed on the site as TIFFs rather than included in the complete book download options. Roughly one-fifth of the specimens digitized and uploaded to the Internet Archive fall into this category. The fold-out material includes type samples …
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Blue Pencil no. 63—Type Specimens 1770 to 1799

This is the third in a series of posts listing type specimens that have been digitized and placed online. Many of them are downloadable in whole or as individual pages. A few items listed are not type specimens, but books that show important typefaces in use.
N.B. Several of the St. Bride Library type specimens available at the Internet Archive have fold-out pages or inserted items which do not appear in the regular viewer or in the PDF downloads. To access …
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Blue pencil no. 62—Type Specimens from 1700 to 1769

This is the second in a series of posts listing type specimens that have been digitized and placed online. Many of them are downloadable in whole or as individual pages. A few items listed are not type specimens, but books that show important typefaces in use.
N.B. Several of the St. Bride Library type specimens available at the Internet Archive have fold-out pages or inserted items which do not appear in the regular viewer or in the PDF downloads. To access …
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Blue Pencil no. 60 addendum—Some comments by Dan Reynolds on “Die Schrift unserer Zeit”

Type historian Dan Reynolds has sent me the following comments regarding my notes to the English translations of Paul Renner’s essay “Futura: Die Schrift unsere Zeit” in Blue Pencil no. 60. Within brackets I have added some clarifying information.

There are two things that deeply bother me about the advertising around Futura’s launch. The first is that, as far as I can remember reading, there does not seem to have been any critical reaction to the phrase “Die Schrift …
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Blue Pencil no. 60—Die Schrift unserer Zeit

Front cover of Futura 1. (Frankfurt am Main: Bauersche Giesserei, 1927). Image courtesy of St. Bride Library.
Futura 1., the first specimen of Paul Renner’s groundbreaking Futura typeface contained an essay titled “Futura: Die Schrift für unserer Zeit” (usually translated as “Futura: The Type for Our Time”). The provocative title is well-known, but Renner’s actual text less so. It has never been translated in full into English. [1] An abridged version appeared as “Futura: The Type of Today and Tomorrow” in …
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Blue Pencil no. 61—Type Specimens 1486 to 1704

This is the first of a series of posts listing type specimens that have been digitized and placed online. Many of them are downloadable in whole or as individual pages.
Warning: accurate dating of type specimens is notoriously complicated. The dates listed here come from the various institutions and organizations that have digitized them. In most cases they have not consulted with a type specialist and thus there are mistakes. Whenever I have noticed such a mistake or when one has …
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Blue Pencil no. 51—ITC as a Pioneer of Diversity in Type Design

Since the summer of 2020 I have been compiling a comprehensive list of digitized type specimens available online. My list includes some unexpected items such as U&lc, the magazine that ITC (International Typeface Corporation) published from 1974 to 1999. The magazine was a stealth type specimen with every article set in an ITC typeface (identified with a tiny credit at the end and also listed on the contents page). But the great majority of issues also introduced (or sometimes …
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