It’s very close to the original Bookman (not the half-arsed limp ITC digitization).

Yes, I was going to say that too, but the ’a’ in Bookman has a shorter tail and the 4 has a baseline serif. If there was such a thing as Cushing Wide, it might be close.

- Mike Yanega

Thanks very much for these suggestions, -
Neither seems to quite hit the mark.
Cushing is close in spirit, but not quite there.
The letterforms are very odd, clumsy in places, irregular, and it gives the font a a lot of character feel when set at smaller sizes.
I add a couple of enlarged samples which might help to identification?

Or this:

or this...

Turns out that Bookman (or Bookman Old Face) wasn’t too far off. However, they are all too ’contemporary’ in their interpretations, compared to the sample posted. When looking for old references, I found this old sample to be very close, something called STRATFORD OLD STYLE by Hansen Type Foundry:

And I found another called ANTIQUE OLD STYLE, credited to the Stevens Shanks foundry in ca. 1860, this time with matching italics:

There is yet another, Antique No. 310, by the Bruce Type Foundry, which later also released a related face called Bartlett Oldstyle. When Bruce was taken over by ATF, they later released Bartlett Oldstyle as Bookman, which may have served as the blueprint for what is Bookman today.

However, the samples I found are still not exact matches (e.g. serif on the numeral 4), but the distinctive lower case ’a’ is there, which I have not found in any other typeface.

Wondering if anyone knows of any digital interpretations of fonts called STRATFORD OLD STYLE, ANTIQUE OLD STYLE, ANTIQUE NO. 310, or BARTLETT OLDSTYLE?

Any pointers?