This paper deals with the development of suitable assistance tools for humanists and historians to help them retrieve information documents. This paper represents a part of this ambitious project and deals with the design of a pixel classification method for ancient typewritten documents. The approach presented here is based on a multiresolution map construction and analysis; for five resolutions we construct five different characterisation maps. All the maps are based on texture information (correlation of pixels orientations, grey level pixel density: etc). After the merging of these 25 maps, each pixel of the original image is described by a vector which allows the computing of a hierarchical classification. In order to avoid issues linked to the binarization process, ail maps are computed for grey level images. The system has been tested on a CESR database of ancient printed books of the Renaissance. The classification results are evaluated through several visual classification illustrations