An 1874 Type Catalog
collectorsweekly.com
collectorsweekly.com
Two on the dirty side, one pulling the big lever and another wielding the ink roller.
Two on the clean side, one to put the paper on the press and another to take it off.
We got to try our hands at this chromatic stuff, with a little bit of metal-leaf thrown in.
That stuff was HARD to get right! But it was really nice when we did.
I'm not an expert on 19th C typography, but I imagine that typography like this wowed people back then, and imparted a kind of authority and grandeur for the businesses that used them.
Look at it as a kind of low-tech WordArt. I especially like the sort-of gradient in the Clarendon example.
I feel compelled to defend nineteenth century typography here :)
I will point to the work of pierre & fermin didot[1]. arguably some of the most enduring in type history - currently it's used a lot in fashion. you just don't like the style of these examples, which is totally reasonable.
I'm not trying to create an argument or anything, but if you look at type history most of it was sorted out around that very period, probably because the price and expertise required for printing was going down. so you'll find typefaces you like (and don't like) in almost every era. the modern typefaces we know and love today are mostly remixes from a few highly productive periods. we've been making tiny variations on existing fonts for centuries -- lettering by bodoni is from the renaissance but it's so contemporary and magazine-y.