Sorts is an open archive of type specimen books in the public domain. A sort is a single piece of metal type; a specimen book is how a foundry showed off the sorts it had to sell. For most of printing history these catalogues sat in rare-book rooms and private collections, scattered and hard to compare. Many have since been digitised — but they remain spread across dozens of library sites in inconsistent formats. Sorts gathers them into one place, catalogued by foundry, year, country and classification, and free to read.
The scans are drawn from the Internet Archive and partner collections including St Bride Library, the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection and the Library of Congress. Every specimen here is in the public domain. Each record links back to its source institution, whose work in preserving and digitising these books made this archive possible.
The images may be reused freely. The cataloguing — the descriptions, classifications and structure — is released under CC BY-SA 4.0.