We present the 1906 American Type Founders “American Line Type Book”. There are several scanned versions of this classic type sales book available online, but many of them are of poor quality, and most of them give you about 1200 pages to wade through to find the good stuff. (Most notably, there is a simply stunning array of type specimen books through the ages - of various qualities - compiled here at the site of Dr. David M. MacMillan, ranging from the 15th century to the current catalogs of letterpress professionals & aficionados. Be prepared to happily lose your mind there, if you like to spend hours looking at old type. We do.)
We intend to bring you a page a day (or thereabouts) of this fascinating & useful type specimen book - a glimpse into our typographic heritage - though we’ll only present pages that we think are interesting or useful. When that book is done - or when y’all get bored, whichever comes first - we’ll move on to something else.
We’re giving you the title page, too, as a taste of what’s to come.
Above also is the ATFC logo, designed by Clarence P. Hornung who you may recognize as the creator of countless well-known publishing & other logos, and as author of numerous well-known books of design, art, and symbology.
The American Type Founders Company was an 1892 North American amalgamation of 23 type foundries - the major type supplier in the U.S. for decades. They sold metal type and printing equipment & supplies; their chief designer, Morris Fuller Benton, created typefaces used today, such as Franklin Gothic, Bank Gothic, Broadway, etc., and other designers, including Frederic Goudy, supplied original designs for now-classic typefaces.
The third image is the bookplate of the Typographic Library and Museum of the American Type Founders Company (founded in 1908 in Jersey City, New Jersey) designed by Bruce Rogers of Riverside Press at Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Image courtesy of the journal “Libraries and the Cultural Record.”)
Enjoy.
P.S. Since we *own* this copy in meatspace, we are able to scan & correct to the quality we like. If you need a higher quality copy for any reason, contact us. This book is in the public domain.
