Boston. 1872 to at least 1922. Annenberg was unable to discover H. C. Hansen's full name (beyond his initials).
Annenberg notes that their last known advertisement appeared in 1922, and that "After that date they closed operations and the machinery was dismantled." ({ Annenberg 1994}: 146) They were not acquired by ATF.
According to {Baker 1998}, Dard Hunter's Mountain House Press acquired a " Martin Torlsaas pivotal casting machine, ... along with other equipment" from the "Hansen Company" in 1942. Her source may be the Prospectus for Hunter's Papermaking in Indo-China {Hunter 1947}. This information presents a puzzle, because this was twenty years after Annenberg's date for the dissolution of the H. C. Hansen type foundry. This caster is not otherwise attested, and it is not clear if the "Hansen Company" was the same as the H. C. Hansen Type Foundry.
Specimen Book of Type (1903)
Specimen Book of Type and Printing Material. (Boston, MA: H. C. Hansen, 1903) The date is from the bibliographic reference for the Hathi digitization. The closest specimen date listed by Annenberg is identified simply as "c1903".
This specimen book has been digitized by Google from the New York Public Library copy and is available via The Hathi Trust (but not via Google). The icon here links to a local PDF assembled from TIFF and JP2 images from The Hathi Trust (retrieved when it was still possible to do so). Hathi ID: nyp.33433006351070. Hathi catalog record: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008609026
A Book of Types (1909)
A Book of Types, Borders, Ornaments, Brass Rule, Printing Materials and the Like for Printerdom. (Boston: The H. C. Hansen Type Foundry, 1909) The Hathi catalog entry for this book lists it as 1908 (based on its copyright date) while Google lists it as 1909 (based on its title page). Both are citing the same scan of the same book.
This book has been digitized by Google from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign copy. It is available both via the Hathi Trust (Hathi ID: uiug.30112005628695. Hathi catalog record: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100207918) and Google ( https://books.google.com/books?id=kopDAQAAMAAJ). The icon here links to a local copy of the Google PDF.
Annenberg calls this 1909 specimen book "one of the best that has ever been produced."
{Annenberg 1994} Stephen O. Saxe [additions, intro], Elizabeth K. Lieberman [index]. Type Foundries of America and their Catalogs New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1994.
{Baker 1998} Baker, Cathleen A. "The Typefaces of Dard Hunter, Senior and Junior." [chapter 4 in] David Pankow, ed. American Proprietary Typefaces. [no location]: American Printing History Association, 1998.
{Hunter 1947} Hunter, Dard [Sr.] Papermaking in Indo-China: Prospectus. Chillicothe, OH: Mountain House Press, 1947.
The 1903 and 1908/9 Hansen specimen books are in the public domain. Their digitizations by Google/Hathi remain in the public domain.
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