Supplement au specimen des nouveaux caracteres
The pattern
This still is filed under Specimen as proof.
Define
A specimen (type, material, finish) is shown so the product proves itself under comparison.
Mechanism
Controlled display. Same conditions, side by side, no adjective required. The sample is the sentence.
Verdict
Buyers choose by eye or by hand and we can put the real thing in front of them.
Why it works
The mechanism is proof by use rather than proof by sample. An alphabet showing tells a printer nothing about colour on the page, word spacing or how the face behaves over hundreds of lines, so the foundry sets whole poems and lets the buyer read them. The lavish white space is itself the argument: it says this foundry is not economising, which is what a luxury book printer is buying. Then the closing note to the trade flips register entirely and converts an aesthetic case into an arithmetic one - characters per line, lines per page, pages per book, paper per edition - so the same object closes both the taste decision and the cost decision.
Steal this when
Steal this when the quality of what you sell only becomes visible at length - long copy, a long-running service, a font, a material - and a swatch would actually undersell you. Also steal the two-register close: pages of pure demonstration, then one plain page that converts the demonstration into the buyer's own unit of measurement.