Nice. I once checked it out from the UCLA library (and made some judicious scans :-) but it will certainly be useful to have it in my pocket, forever. :-)

hhp

Some of the color pages are fairly sharp, but the majority of the pages are just fuzzy, not suitable to study any details.

@Hrant, have you seen the hi-res yet? If not, download one section.

If you just want to look at old faces, that's one thing; they're not usable as source material.

If you don't have the hard copy, you can buy one for $300-350.

You have your choice of a 149MB or a higher-res 999MB PDF version.

If you don't give a rat's ass, or free hi-res digital isn't good enough, do without, fuhgeddaboudit, and QYB.

Sheesh!

Steve, thanks for posting this.

Questioning the quality of resolution and color on a typographic forum is not bitching.
400 dpi is not high resolution for type.
I always like to see the impression that metal type makes, and the ink gain, and can never get enough res.
One doesn’t have to be a “literal revivalist” to want that.

Of course, it would be too many megabites now to scan the whole catalog at “super high res”, but if the internet is to present a simulacrum of the real object, some artefacts must be shown, say a few pages, in higher resolution, and perhaps in oblique views revealing depth, or even in 3D.

One day, thanks to Moore’s Law, this sort of zoom in will be possible:

As an aside, scanning a 35 mm color slide on a transparency scanner ($150 scanner, 9600 dpi), you can get down to the film grain. Accordingly, I calculate the 35 mm recorded image as around 15 megapixels.

Your screengrab seems to show a highly satisfactory resolution for most purposes.

It is sufficient for type revivals, I would think, to give a specific example.

This was posted in case anyone wanted to see what the 1923 ATF Specimen Book and Catalog looked like, out of curiousity or historical interest, without spending hundreds of dollars.

Help me out. A digital copy of a digital original is an exact duplicate. A scan of anything—theoretically—can never be as good as the original. If the hi-res PDF is viewed at the same size as the original book, how much difference is there to someone with normal and unaided vision?

To those who bemoan the lack of resolution, what magnification would you take to the book? 10X, 30X, 100X, 1000X? How big an enlargement is too big, assuming for typographical purposes, and not to sell 24" X 24" prints?

Are we talking perfection and theory here or something practical?

Steve, I don’t have a copy of this particular specimen book.
This new online project is of absolutely no use to me.
And yet surely I represent the kind of person that would be interested in an historical type specimen book.
I have been all over the internet looking at scans of old typography, and there is NEVER ENOUGH RES!
I’m not satisfied with admiring page layouts, as a typophile—a connoisseur of type—I want to see those delicate details of craftsmanship (both founding and printing) that Hrant refers to. That’s the sine qua non of letterpress.
I don’t think it’s too much to ask for bigger files—after all, people are downloading gigabytes of movies—and this is surely the trend. So I say to those altruists who scan and post, get with the tour!

In the meantime, I will continue to collect original historical documents, or reference material with ultra-high resolution photographic reproductions printed by gravure, such as The Art & History of Books by Norma Levarie:
http://www.alibris.com/booksearch.detail?invid=10024732733&qwork=425630&...
(This is the 1968 edition which I refer to, I don’t know how good the reproductions are in subsequent editions.)
Online scans have to be better than those in this book, which has the advantage of being printed on paper, the reflective medium of the originals, and thus has that quality of facsimile authenticity which online resources don’t have—unless one can print out a page from a digital scan at comparable resolution, but that’s a tall order.

Although more resolution would be useful and nice, this is considerably better than the previous version (which basically had to be downloaded as individual page images, if one could figure out how to do that - click on "all files (HTTPS)").

http://archive.org/details/SpecimenBookAndCatalogue1923

There are already some other specimen books on the Internet Archive (chiefly by Circuitous Root) that are at significantly higher resolutions, but which pose potential difficulties in downloading. (They can, however, be overcome, since nothing prevents you from using a "download manager" program with the Internet Archive, it should be noted.)

The delicate details of craftsmanship are the key to understanding letterpress.
Firstly there is the work of the punch cutter and the letter founder.
Then there is the work of the press man.
Those are connected.
One has to see how the metal bites into the paper, and how the ink is deposited.
The letters were designed with that in mind.
So how can one understand an historical type design without intimately observing this three-dimensional physical process?

"I seems as though you want more res than the original designers ever had or were capable of. (Or am I wrong about that?)"

Quite wrong, yes.

I seems as though you want more res than the original designers ever had or were capable of. (Or am I wrong about that?)

The machining tolerances for Linotype design and manufacture were down to one quarter of 1/1,000th of an inch. Presumably they could measure that precisely as well. By my calculation, that would be equivalent to a resolution of 4,000 ppi.

The type production drawings were done at a scale of approximately 10 inches high. For a 10-pt type, that would be equivalent to zooming in to around 7200%.

Note that the sidebearings here differ by 0.00025 inches. That would be the equivalent of 1.8 em units in a digital font with a 1000 UPM.

…a map of the thing itself on a 1 to 1 scale…

A stereotype.

**

I imagine that if pixels were put on pistons, then the effect of relief printing could be simulated.

duplicate post deleted

that's not how people read.

But it is how people make.

hhp

That may not be how people read, but this is a type specimen, not a novel.

Sure, the layout and display type are adequate, and there is some art historical interest in the faux ads, but a certain amount of the book is text type, and that is rendered meaningless at the so-called high res of the files in question.

I wonder what my resolution is, when I take off my glasses and look at type from four inches, which is what I prefer.

Except the sensors in a scanner are not that funny density, so it's moot.

hhp

Hmmm, maybe NASA can control camera distances that precisely... :-) Not to mention that different parts of the original would have to be at exactly the same distance to the lens, so you'd need some kind of special shallow bowl to place the original in, and somehow get it to sit perfectly flat in it...

Plus I'm actually not sure how pervasive L&G's claim is (although it would certainly make more sense for ATF than in general).

hhp

"Presumably they could measure that precisely as well"

We had different brass rules for each size master (8, 10, or 12 e.g.), but they all met at 10,000th of an inch.

@John: I still think that someone interested in performing a type revival would have the data he needs from the specimen book as it is provided, even if it will mean a little more work.

I used a 10× loupe on 10 pt. type when I was working on my Scotch Modern revival.
I needed to look that closely, because I was trying to make a font that would create a facsimile, with today’s high-res offset lithography, of mid 19th century high-res letterpress printing. The amount of press gain is quite different now, and works differently on different parts of the letter than it did back then. I needed to see the variations in hairline and serif thicknesses in the original, closely, and how much of that was in the metal and how much the result of ink gain, in order to understand the structure and function of that type design and thus enable an accurate simulacrum.

One of the things I discovered in the Scotch Modern project was that facsimile revivals, with their antiquarian flavour, are an abstruse taste. Bembo has a broader appeal and usefulness than Poliphilus.

So you are correct John, that there is enough information in these ATF PDFs for “a type revival”, if not for facsimile quality.

Ink gain as Nick calls it or "squish" as I call it - is what gave letterpress a warmth and variety that digital set lithography does not have. It also had an impact on the weight of some digital versions of typefaces depending on the source. The spread of the letter depended on press pressure, nature of ink etc.