Type Reference

Type Reference · June 30

Hi all,

I’m David, part of a small team that recently launched Type Reference, a curated archive of historical type specimen books. The material comes from a private collection and includes high-quality scans of rare specimens from the 1800s onwards.

You can browse everything visually, with both monthly subscriptions, and one-off payments. We're adding new books each month as we digitise them

If it’s useful to your research or work, we’d love to hear what you'd like to see more of.

Thanks,

David

p.s. I hope this is the right category for this post. Realise it's kind of an "ad", but I'm hoping it will be helpful for the larger community!

Thomas Phinney · June 30

I think this could become a super valuable service. Some great type catalogs are included, and a fair variety for launch, for sure.

I saw you had a search function, so I tried a number of searches for names of typefaces that are in the 1941 ATF catalog supplement, and got no hits. I would think that typeface name search is a must-have feature to make this a valuable service. Did I miss something?

The images of the sample catalogs seem to be photos rather than scans, and not forced flat at all. For brief catalogs that lay pretty flat anyway, this is not a big deal. But for the 1941 ATF catalog (and I would expect most large catalogs of 100+ pages), the images are MUCH less useful than they could be, for people hoping to make fonts based on those scans.

The pricing (£35/mo with watermarked images and no image download capabiity, £60/mo with no watermarks and direct downloads) is much higher than I would have guessed. But I will be the first to say that pricing something like this must be very challenging. I certainly don’t know what the income-maximizing or profit-maximizing prices would be. (I might have guessed a fraction of those prices… but it could be that the audience willing to pay anything meaningful is super limited, and willing to pay that much.)

Aaron Bell · June 30

Is there a reason why you don’t reveal who is behind the website?

Simon Cozens · June 30

300dpi scans are somewhat on the low side for a type reference.

Thomas Phinney · June 30

For text faces, definitely. Especially for people wanting to do revivals.

Fine for display faces, though. (IMO.)

There is a not-yet-fully-enabled concept for being able to request a high-res scan. I would hope they would have those higher-res scans done up front for everything, just not hooked up to the online viewing. For download only, no human intervention or delays.

Dan Reynolds · July 1

Thank you, David, for providing more information about your site!

I have to admit that, once it launched, I was a bit perplexed about the costs and the business model. Several libraries and museums, both in the United States and in Europe, have already begun digitizing either select type specimens or even broad swathes of their collections. These digitizations are usually presented online for free. Some libraries even explicitly publish their images with a licenses allowing their images to be freely used and re-used.

There is already an excellent website run by a Ralf Herrmann, a typographer and type design in Thuringia, which is collecting links to these in one place (https://letterlibrary.org/). Stephen Coles, from Letterform Archive, also has a list of his own (https://library.typographica.org/specimen-books-of-metal-wood-type). Paul Shaw has a number of lists in blog posts on his website as well.

Many of those museums and libraries have only published their images (free to use or otherwise) in resolutions of 72 dpi or 300 dpi, which as Simon and Thomas mention, is generally not enough for type designers. Letterform Archive, as far as I can tell, sells licenses for its images, which are better-quality photographs than just about anywhere else.

Since the pandemic, I have been involved with a few efforts in Germany to digitize and publish type specimens and other foundry records in public collections. All of those images are free to use and re-use, and I suspect that several thousand type more specimen catalogs are on their way soon, following that model. I’m all for the presentation of any many specimens as possible, as soon as possible. But in the current environment, I don’t quite see the need for expensive subscription models.

There is surely a niche market for the sale of single individually-digitized images in very high resolutions, though. Especially for individual type designers busy reviving specific typefaces. They’ll want 600 or 1200 dpi scans, though.

Christopher Slye · July 2

There is more information on Letterform Archive’s image reproduction rights here:

https://letterformarchive.org/image-rights-reproduction/

jeremy tribby · July 2

yeah, existing efforts, museums, libraries, and archives are the competition for this sort of thing. still, if you have a specific point of view or focus on objects that are a little bit outside the purview of those other collections, you could end up with a collection that’s unique and still of general interest to type people. the current collection is not quite to where I’d subscribe myself (yet!)

fwiw, I recently commissioned the photography of a handful of pages from the letterform archive’s collection after a visit and I think the in house photography is very good. the cost was low, and there couldn’t be more knowledgeable people to work with. I’m lucky to live nearby, but it’s not the only institution as dan points out - it can be really nice working with libraries and museums on these sorts of projects, even when it’s difficult internationally, and the type world is full of generous people. an online subscription could be really useful if it happens to have something I’m looking for that I just can’t find anywhere else, but there’s something to be said for the hunt

Type Reference

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