What's your process for identifying a font? Do you follow a specific method/have specific books that your recommend?
For modern fonts, especially free fonts, I tend to use What Font Is. (There's also WhatTheFont, but it only includes commercial fonts and I haven't had as much luck with it.)
For fonts from the 60s/70s/80s, I look through Photo-Lettering's One-Line Manual of Styles, which is a huge collection of samples of fonts that were available in the 70s. For even older fonts, there's various older catalogs to search in, though that doesn't come up very often. (EDIT: The Photo-Lettering catalogue got removed from the Internet Archive. I changed the link to the one at the Letterform Archive.)
Unfortunately modern fonts are more decentralized, so there's no one catalog that covers them well. Fontscape tries, but its coverage is limited. Sometimes if a font looks like a particular foundry's style, I'll see if I can find it on their website. E.g. Emigre and House Industries tend to have a recognizable style.
Sometimes the font looks similar to a font I know, or I find a font on What Font Is that's not right but close. In that case, I go to the font's page on Fonts In Use, and check under Related Typefaces to see if any of them match. (E.g. for this post, I recognized that it looked like Data 70, so I went to the Fonts In Use page for Data 70, and found Magnetic Ink in the related typefaces.)
Sometimes I use Identifont, mostly for cases where there's a lot of common fonts that are very similar. The Differences tool is really helpful to compare two similar fonts side by side to make sure I've got the right one.
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