Instead of starting his senior year at Harvard, Boni convinced his father to finance the establishment (originally at 95 Fifth Avenue[5] and then at 135 MacDougal Street) of the Washington Square Bookshop[6] with Albert's brother Charles as a partner.

The door is now held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and Albert's signature can be found on front panel 2.

It occurred to Boni that if he could reduce rather than enlarge photographs, this technology may enable publication companies and libraries to access much greater quantities of data at a minimum cost of material and storage space.

Over the following decade, Boni worked to develop microprint, a micro-opaque process in which pages were photographed using 35mm microfilm and printed on cards using offset lithography.

patent 2260552A This process proved to produce a 6" by 9" index card which stored 100 pages of text from the normal sized publications he was reproducing.

He also published an article A Guide to the Literature of Photography and Related Subjects (1943) which appeared in a supplemental 18th issue of the Photo-Lab Index.