anyone know what the M&R is at the bottom of each letter? i'm not well educated on metal type.

Must be Miller & Richard.
That second ampersand is very Goudy.

hhp

i thought the whole thing was rather Goudy. I know i've seen that "g" before.

.

Might be Goudy National…

Scratch that: the lowercase /a is very close, but that's about it…

Thanks for the feedback thus far. Nick Sherman has a Miller & Richard specimen book, so I've asked him to have a look to see if he can find it, but if anyone else has any ideas, please let me know...

Found it in an undated Miller & Richards catalog from the University of California collection, digitized by Microsoft. Good luck finding a digital version: the original typeface was named Trajan (pp. 317 et seq.). Go figure...

Note: the specimen book doesn't show an ampersand for the Roman, but it does for the Bold weight, and the design matches the second ampersand shown.

Thanks Nick, much appreciated. Any chance you could post a link to the page, or a JPG/PDF?

This appears to be the same book; Trajan specimens start on page 317…

http://www.archive.org/download/printingtypespec00millrich/printingtypes...

Wonderful, thanks Nick.

Giving the embedded viewer a try: