1. Introduction

The 1934 American Type Founders' Book of American Types was the first book-length specimen to emerge from the foundry since their monumental 1923 Specimen Book and Catalogue . It is, however, much shorter; ATF never again came close to its 1923 achievement.

This present webpage contains only a few pages from it. Go up one page for a complete version (the Hathi/Google scan, which was done at a relatively low resolution).

2. Partial Scans

Each of the pages shown below was scanned at 1200 dpi in RGB and saved losslessly as a PNG image. If you click on the image for the page, you will get a PDF version which encapsulates a derived image which has been processed to 50 percent size (effectively 600dpi) and transformed lossily into a JPEG. These average about 8 Megabytes in size and are easy to handle. Within the text explaining each page, there are links to two 1200dpi versions of the image: one a JPEG conversion (generally of about 26 Megabytes) and the original PNG scan (generally about 180 Megabytes). It is difficult for the eye to detect any difference between the two.

Note that many web browsers are configured to fail silently to load very large images. Most browsers also do a very poor job in scaling and allowing you to navigate large images. (The 1200dpi images are 10104 by 14039 pixels.) I would strongly suggest that you do not simply click on the 1200dpi versions to try to load/view them in your browser. Instead, download them and view them offline.

It might well be asked why these scans are RGB when the original pages are "black and white" (particularly when the file sizes are so large). The answer is that "black and white" is an abstraction not to be found in the physical reality of the printed page. No ink is perfectly black, no paper perfectly white. It takes a full color digital image to even begin to approach the information content of a simple black-and-white printed page.

2.1. Pages 76-81: Cloister Family