I own a few vintage tool catalogs. I don't really collect these but I believe all old catalogs should be scanned and made public since I know the pain of missing out on a vintage catalog that one really wants.
I scan these at 600 dpi with good settings for black and white points to not waste any bits and then use ScanTailor to split, align, and cut them to their original layout. Sometimes contrast needs to be tweaked a bit with IrfanView. When I scan pages with the catalog taken apart I get a weird page order I fix with TotalCommander. Finally I use tesseract to OCR the images and create a single PDF which I then linearize with qpdf for faster web viewing. The resulting PDFs can easily be printed on A4 or A5 and are fully searchable.
I provide these PDFs for free and w/o any copyright (obviously), so do whatever you want with them!
Note: Often these catalogs contain wonderful drawings that can be desirable for printing or t-shirts. If the embedded JPG in the PDF is not sufficient enough, I am keeping the original TIFFs and hq PDFs of all of my scans.
Selected raw scans are available for a limited time in my google drive. Grab them now and turn them into posters, etc.