Third Revised Specimen Book and Price List of Printing Material
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
It is a demonstration catalogue in which the medium and the merchandise are the same ink, so a claim about quality is impossible to make and impossible to avoid testing. The ornament pages go further than showing characters - they assemble them into finished job work, which removes the imaginative labour from the buyer and shows the fount already earning money. Setting the specimen lines as jokes and rhymes (OUR LITTLE POLLY'S DEAD, ROLLING STONES / CATCH NO MOSS) makes hundreds of near-identical pages individually memorable, which is the only way a browser ever finds a page twice. And the front matter does the ugly work early - terms, index, the interchangeable body system - so the rest of the book can be nothing but product.
Steal this when
Steal this when your catalogue is long enough that browsing, not searching, is how buyers use it: show each item at working size, price it on the same line, and give each page one memorable phrase so it can be found again. The ornament-panel move is the one to copy for component or template libraries - show the parts, then show one finished thing built from them.