1939 huh. That could be difficult.

Look at University Roman.

or Carlton

there are many differences betwen University and this ...

here is another sample from the book cover
Cover Uppercase

You’re probably not going to get an exact match.

You could also look at Belucian but the lower case is very different.

Carlton is more closed, but still not the same
I think it was a design derived from Carlton

here is one more detailed sample

I just want to someone to identify the font, no problem if there is no digital exact match.

I have an old type specimen catalog of this period from the Nebiolo foundry, Torino. This is a Romanian knockoff of their Radio series which was available in chiara, corsiva, corsiva nera, nera, litografica styles. This looks quite like Radio Nera (black) to me. Hard to forget that lowercase t. The chiara and corsiva companion are quite nice. The Romanian seems to differ only in that the bowls of the uppercase are slightly condensed and thus range a bit higher throughout.

Gerald Lange

Gerald, thank you for the identification.
I would be grateful if you can send me (when you have time) the scanned page from that catalog. I like this font very much.
Or you could post it somewhere I can see.

Thanks again.

I hate to subject that fairly fragile yet bulky specimen book to the back breaking scanner (the binding is a bit iffy the way it is, and it was an expensive purchase) but I’ll give it a try. I’ve got a blog where I will put it up (temporarily) in the next day or so. I don’t recall that there are full character sets though.

http://TypeRoad.blogspot.com

I also noticed, belatedly, that the Romanians had caned the lowercase f. A bit odd. It certainly funks it up a bit. Wonder if that was just a nationalistic thing.

Gerald

Cromy

OK, they are up. Don’t look too bad. I’ll be taking them down sooner than later as they don’t relate to the site.

Gerald

Thanks a lot Gerald, I took a look at them and there is no doubt this is the font. I saved the scans from your blog, you can take them down now.
Don’t know the history of this font in Romania ... why they modified the f. The book I have is the only place I’ve seen this font.