They sure went to a lot of trouble to reverse-engineer that just to make a font but they probably saved a big bundle, too. We had a single glyph digitized (typesetting company logo) which appeared in the headers on all our Lino 202 galleys. Mergenthaler charged us several thousand dollars -- for just that single glyph! We were a large company though so the cost wasn't as important as the company image was, and we paid it.

Image is important! My knowledge of photo-typesetting is minimal - when did it start becoming commonly used?

The first published book to be set by phototypesetting dates from 1953, and the first newspaper to make the switch from metal type was in 1954.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting