To all type enthousiasts!
The
North-Holland Archives house the collection of the famous Haarlem based Typefoundry and printer Joh. Enschedé. Within this collection there's a subcollection of over 2000 historical type-specimen from different typefoundries from the Netherlands/all over Europe between 1700-1990.
The inventory of this subcollection is now online (in Dutch, but searchable by names, titles and dates), and free digital scans of any type specimen can be requested by anyone.
Feel free to browse through the collection
here. As an example, you can view the digitized type-specimen by Enschedé from 1768
here.
Have fun!
Comments
The scans can be requested by going to the description of the type-specimen you'd like to have digitized, and click on the CD-icon in the list of icons (these should appear tomorrow, after an update). Then you fill out a form and it should be digitized in 2-3 weeks. You'll get a notification when it's done. As soon as it's digitized, other people can also view and download the images.
There is a how-to page, but unfortunately its only available in Dutch (here). I don't know how well this holds up to a Google-translate query, but feel free to give it a try. If it doesn't appear to work, or if you have any further questions, feel free to contact info[at]noord-hollandsarchief.nl and they should be able to help you out