Teaching at FIT, they give adjuncts small shared offices that are great repositories of graphic design clutter from student projects to books - one of which in my office was Photo-lettering Inc's Alphabet Thesaurus Vol.2, published in the mid-60s. With, literally, thousands of typeface examples, it's a coveted resource for type design from an era before digitized anything, when couriers shuttled around bags of typeset photostats to agency art departments around the city. These catalogs were everywhere when I began typesetting and doing paste-ups in the late 80's but were quickly obsolete and largely thrown out when Macs took over. They're expensive to come by nowadays with nice examples in the $300 range. Ed Rondthaler was the director of PLINC and published a type memoir in 1981 that I've just bought an out-of-print edition of with the generous support (Amazon gift card) of a former workmate for helping out with design advice. Thanks Becca!
Spend some time at House Industries' excellent PLINC history.
A few pages of type from Ed Rondthaler's book here.