[3 Morisawa Specimen Books, 1984]

Who doesn’t love a specimen book? How about three of them? These three come from Morisawa, the Japanese typesetting powerhouse. Designed by Ikko Tanaka, each volume focuses on a different kind of type, translated by Google as follows: 

1. Basic Edition
2. Japanese Text Edition
3. Knitting Sample Edition

Clearly No. 3 above isn’t quite right. Still, as Morisawa was setting typographic standards in Japan, these books are standard references that let us know what was happening there forty years ago. Includes a showing in Volume 1 of Latin faces, too, so we can know what they had access to back then. Rare.