John Baskerville
The English printer who chased perfection in ink and paper and gave the world a typeface still in use three centuries after his death.
John Baskerville was not trained as a typographer. He made his money in japanning and papier-mâché before turning, in his forties, to the craft he would reinvent. What he brought was a perfectionist's eye and a manufacturer's control over every stage of production — from the alloy in the type to the surface of the paper — and the result was a typeface and a printing aesthetic that reset European expectations of what a book could look like.
From Birmingham trade to the printing press
Baskerville was born in Luton, Worcestershire, in 1706. He worked as a writing master and gravestone carver before establishing himself in Birmingham as a japanner — producing lacquered goods in the Asian style that were fashionable in England's expanding consumer market. He was successful enough that by the early 1750s he could afford to take up printing as what he called a "philosophical amusement."
That amusement consumed the rest of his life. He constructed his own press, oversaw the cutting of new type punches, experimented for years with ink formulation, and invented or refined a smoother printing surface: wove paper, formed on a fine wire mesh rather than the ribbed mould that left "laid" lines in conventional paper. The result was a surface that held impression with new precision.
The Baskerville typeface and the 1757 Virgil
His first major publication, an edition of Virgil's works, appeared in 1757. The typeface he had developed for it — a transitional design between the old-style faces of Caslon and the high-contrast moderns of Didot — showed a new crispness in the letterforms: more vertical axis, higher contrast between thick and thin strokes, and pronounced serifs. It was set on wider leading than convention allowed, printed on his wove paper with his dense black ink, and hot-pressed after printing to flatten the sheets to a near-gloss finish.
Contemporary reactions split sharply. Many printers and readers found the high contrast fatiguing; Benjamin Franklin, who became a friend, reported that critics in London claimed the Baskerville i's looked like l's at reading distance. Baskerville responded with a demonstration test that conclusively showed the difference.
Having been an early admirer of the beauty of letters, I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them.
The Cambridge Bible and Continental influence
In 1758 Baskerville was appointed Printer to the University of Cambridge. His Cambridge Bible, folio and octavo editions of the Book of Common Prayer, and Milton's Paradise Lost followed. The Cambridge appointment gave him access to the paper quality he needed and the institutional prestige to silence some critics.
His typeface found its greatest champions outside England. Giambattista Bodoni in Parma and the Didot family in Paris studied and adapted his high-contrast method; the modern serif faces that dominated European printing through the nineteenth century trace their formal logic to Baskerville's experiments. Benjamin Franklin took matrices of his type to Paris and used them for American diplomatic documents.
