Check out Font Diner and get your hands on the Indie Fonts books you will find some of the kind of fonts you are looking for.

The Jukebox collection has some especially nice vintage scripts and other retro display faces.

House Industries has a voluminous pile of pop-culture, period-inspired collections as well.

thanks for the tips...i'm finding quite a few options for 50's, 60's, 70,s.

The most difficult decades seem to be 80's , 90's & 00's.

for 80's: fonts designed by Neville Brody.

for 90's: fonts designed by Bureau Destruct.

for 00's use DIN.

for all 3 decades you could also shop Emigre.

For the 80s, I'd go with Serif Gothic and Helvetica as prime choices.

For the 90s, it's all about Emigre, either Matrix or one of the other totally ubiquitous designs they created.

For the 00's, how can you go wrong with Crackhouse from House Industries? That was everywhere!

http://www.fontalicious.com has some nice late 70s and 80s faces.

Stuart :D

As Grant said, House has a lot of good retro fonts... grunge/punk, street rod, Latin American, etc.

Hoefler's stuff is almost all inspired by old metal type, although it is a bit mainstream now thanks to all their awesome commissions.

>50's, 60',s, 70's, 80's, 90's

Any century in particular?

twentieth century {19--'s}