Resource for type identification

Thanks Barb! What a great find!!!!!!!! I was actually terribly excited to see this posted. Of over 1,900 fonts of handset type in my shop, I only have a handful or so that remain unidentified. One such font bears the pinmark of the Chicago Tyoe Foundry so I thought that I would finally be able to find and identify it once and for all.

ARRRRGGGGHHHH! No such luck. Mine is a basic roman all-cap font with lots of fancy alternate characters. It is simply not shown in that 1890 catalog. I picked up this gem many years ago at one of Bill McGarry’s printer’s fairs in Stillwater, MN. So the name remains, for now, Stillwater in my shop.

Hello Foolproof546

Why don’t you post a specimen of your mystery font, an alphabet or something you have printed in it. One of us may be able to identify it.

Regards,
Geoffrey

Being somewhat of a Luddite, I don’t have the capability or savvy to scan an image and post it. The best I can do is print 150 specimens and put them into the APA bundle to see if an APA member might be able to ID it.

Hi Barbara,
Its great that you mentioned Internet Archive.org.
I have been downloading books from it for some time, and only recently started trawling through the printing stuff.
Its already paid off as I have found a couple of old printing texts that have gone into some detail on how my Wharfedale is supposed to work. Even the old wood engravings have helped identify some of the missing or unattached parts.
The books by Southward and others by Jacoby are particularly good as they have lots of good old fashioned printers knowledge in them.
Ron

Since your original post, Google books has scanned A TON of type foundry collections. If you go on google books, you can just search for type foundry or anything along those lines and you can find them.