Sigh.

You used to be able to get a specimen for any typeface you liked, and save it with all the others for reference....

... and then categorize them e.g. as John Hudson has suggested here: http://www.typophile.com/node/9757

I keep my fonts organized on my hard drive in the same way that I keep them in my font management application.

@ crossgrove, what do you mean?

@ tina, Thanks for the link!

@ Miss Tiffany, What program do you use for font management? I’m on a PC :( Do you have a collection of font images also or are these just your font files?

jesse: for typefaces i’d like to acquire licences to, i have a little wishlist bouncing around in my head. if i want to get a closer look at a face, i usually see if there’s a PDF available to get a closer look.
I do the same as tiffany by sorting typefaces by foundry.

On a PC you’re lucky, because Adobe Type Manager (ATM) still works fine:
http://www.adobe.com/products/atm/index.html
or, as an alternative, you might consider “typograf”:
http://neuber.com/typograph/

Without a specimen, a typeface is essentially an idea. Type for print performs differently in different environments, and it’s nearly impossible to know how well it performs, without printed examples. In our digital world, nobody wants to spend money on printed specimens. So to choose a font for a book or magazine, you have to view them onscreen at a large size, and then somehow infer how the fonts will look when printed much smaller on paper. That’s an unreasonable leap to ask people to make, when they’re going to spend money and commit their project to a certain typeface.

Some foundries offer PDF specimens, you could collect them and print them out, put them in a binder. But that’s limited by your own output quality.<