I was poking around the referrer logs for ricoblog, and I stumbled across the Hebrew Typography Blog by Ari Davidow. It doesn't look like it gets updated often, but there is some cool stuff on there.

One of the very cool items (to me, anyway) was a link to a Hebrew Type Database. Typophiles, beware, particularly if you're into Hebrew. I know the Hebrew alphabet and that's about it, but the Hebrew Type Database has sucked me in.

The primary presentation (available in German, English, Russian, and Hebrew, it appears) involves sample type from a number of different sources. These appear to have been scanned in. Based on the date range in the “selection criterion” box, I'd guess that one can select typefaces by date range and place of printing.

From each source, one can go to the “detail” page. For instance, here's the detail page for a sephardic font, Zierletter. From here, you can click on any character for a huge detail shot of the glyph. The tav (taw) is pretty cool. If you click on the book title (if it is active) you can get more information on the book the font occurs in. I clicked on  מסכת חולין (the 1579 title) and can see page images and all sorts of info about the book. Whether all books are documented this well, I don't know — but I could spend hours just surfing around looking at the books and images.

Warning: If you're more bibliophile than typophile (that's me) don't even click on the Bibliographie-synopsis link. Don't do it. Really. I warned you — you'll be lost for hours!