I recently came across this book written by a team of very smart engineers, published by Philips in 1950: https://frank.pocnet.net/other/Philips/PhilipsTechnicalLibrary/Philips_Zwikker_Fluorescentieverlichting_1950_nl.pdf
It contains a lot of information about the early pre-halophosphate phosphors and their spectral characteristics, phosphors for HPMV lamps versus fluorescents and why each uses different ones, and a whole lot more (i only read 50 pages so far). It has over 250 pages in total, just about fluorescent lighting, the technology and the applications.
It contains both mathmatical and intuitive descriptions of how things work. Very much worth a read.

Although written in dutch, today's automatic translation systems will get a translation 95% right. The final 5% you'll have to fill in yourself, dutch and english are very alike coming from the same language family.

Aside from that, it contains pictures of early fluorescent lighting installations.