Historical Formspresents:

1: John Baskerville

Historical Forms2

John Baskerville was born in 1706 at Wolverley in Worcestershire. He was a man with a lifelong passion for beautiful lettering and books. By 1723 he had become a skilled engraver of tombstones and was teaching writing. He moved to Birmingham in about 1726 and set up a school in the Bull Ring where he

taught writing and book-keeping, whilst still maintain-ing his work as an engraver. In 1738 he set up a japan-ning business in Moor Street (japanning was an early form of enamelling), in which he first showed his mettle as an innovator, ‘effecting an entire revolution’ in the manu-facture of japanned goods, and specialising in salvers, tea trays, bread baskets and the like. Within a decade he had become a wealthy man and had bought an estate of some eight acres and a large house on the site of the present-day Baskerville House.

31: John Baskerville

In 1757

John Baskerville

printed his

famous edition

of Virgil on a

new kind of

paper, called

Wove (known in

Europe as Vélin).

This paper is

now known to

have been made

by the elder James

Whatman.

Whilst keeping on his japanning business, in about 1750 he once again turned his attention to his passion, typog-raphy. He experimented with paper-making, ink manu-facturing, type founding and printing, producing his first typeface in about 1754. Never afraid to innovate, he made changes to the way in which metal type was made, enabling him to produce finer, more delicate lettering than any before him had achieved. He invented his own lustrous, uniquely black, opaque ink; he was the first to exploit commercially James Whatman’s invention of wove paper, which was much smoother than the traditional laid paper; and he modified the printing process by using heated cop-per cylinders to dry the ink before it had time to soak too far into the paper. All of these innovations enabled Bask-erville to produce printed work of an elegance, crispness and clarity never seen before.In 1757 he published his first book, an edition of Virgil. This was followed by some fifty other classics. In 1758 he became printer to the Cambridge University Press for which, in 1763, he published his masterpiece. Ironi-cally for a confirmed atheist, his greatest work was a folio edition of the Bible, which. represented a monumental advance upon the standards and practices of the time. He established a lasting friendship with the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin, who had built up a suc-cessful printing business in Philadelphia, and who visited Baskerville in Birmingham. John Baskerville’s guiding principles in his work were sim-plicity, elegance and above all, clarity. The typeface that bears his name remains one of the most pleasing of the all-time great classical fonts, vastly superior to the dismal Times Roman which, sadly, has become all too ubiquitous. He lived with his partner, Sarah Eaves. He was accused of creating type that was "unattractive and painful."Baskerville turned the creative process on its head: he designed his namesake typeface not in accordance with the technological capabilities available to him, but rather to suit his particular aesthetic sensibilities. He then pro-ceeded to redesign the printing press, and paper-finishing to accommodate the reproduction of his type.It took John Baskerville six years to complete the drawings

Historical Forms4

for his type and another two to oversee its cutting. When finished, he discovered that conventional printing presses could not adequately capture its subtleties and redesigned his own. In place of wood, he used a machined brass bed and platen and a smooth vellum tympan (a sheet that was placed between the impression surface and the paper to be printed) packed with fine cloth to ensure that the two planes of the press met more evenly.Setting up a mill on his own land in Birmingham, Basker-ville manufactured what we today refer to as wove paper, made on very fine meshes that resulted in smooth, silky stock.Baskerville invented an ink that was both quick-drying, allowing him to print the reverse sides of his paper faster, and uncommonly rich, black and lustrous in appearance.While printers and type founders in England claimed that the combination of fine type printed on smooth, reflec-tive paper made his books difficult to read, John Basker-ville's efforts were praised by his peers in both Continental Europe and the United States. Printing and typographic luminaries no less than Ben Franklin and Giambattista Bodoni were great admirers and lively correspondents.

The Baskerville typeface

The Baskerville was originally designed as a metal charac-ter for manual composition. Many digital versions with the name of Baskerville are sufficiently faithful to the original design, but often lack the small caps and old style figures, which are essential for the spirit of nature and the graphic uniformity of the text.

"Baskerville's type was unlike anything that had come before it. Considered by contemporary historians to be the quintessential example of a transitional face, it featured rounded characters, a perpendicular axis, strong contrasts between thicks and thins and very fine, sharp serifs, all of which clearly distinguished it from the old-style faces it followed."

The high-contrast, sparkly look of ITC New Baskerville is well-suited to longer texts and display uses.

51: John Baskerville

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0123456789 - 0123456789

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0123456789 - 0123456789

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

0123456789 - 0123456789

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

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ITC New Baskerville 13pt

Roman

Italic

Bold Italic

Bold

fight Baskerville’s

double-story

open ‘g’

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Q: Are we not men? A: We are Devo

Historical Forms6

The Baskerville is classified as transitional. As a matter of fact, with its generous proportions, it appears not very dif-ferent from its predecessors. But the difference between fine and bold strokes is more marked, the lower-case ser-ifs are almost horizontal and the emphasis on the stroke widths is almost vertical.The Baskerville typeface is the result of John Baskerville's intent to improve upon the types of William Caslon. He increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes, making the serifs sharper and more tapered, and shifted the axis of rounded letters to a more vertical position. The curved strokes are more circular in shape, and the charac-ters became more regular. These changes created a greater consistency in size and form.Baskerville's typeface was the culmination of a larger series of experiments to improve legibility which also included paper making and ink manufacturing. The result was a typeface that reflected Baskerville's ideals of per-fection, where he chose simplicity and quiet refinement. His background as a writing master is evident in the dis-tinctive swash tail on the uppercase Q and in the cursive serifs in the Baskerville Italic. The refined feeling of the typeface makes it an excellent choice to convey dignity and tradition.In 1757, Baskerville published his first work, a collection of Virgil, which was followed by some fifty other classics. In 1758, he was appointed printer to the Cambridge Uni-versity Press. It was there in 1763 he published his master work, a folio Bible, which was printed using his own type-face, ink, and paper.

Q QITC New

Baskerville Std

Baskerville Old Face

71: John Baskerville

marked difference between

fine and bold strokes

axis of rounded letters

shifted to a more vertical

position

the curved strokes have

a circular shape

The perfection of his work seems to have unsettled his contemporaries, and some claimed the stark contrasts in his printing damaged the eyes. Abroad, however, he was much admired, notably by Fournier, Bodoni (who intended at one point to come to England to work under him), and Benjamin Franklin.After falling out of use with the onset of the modern type-faces such as Bodoni, Baskerville was revived in 1917 by Bruce Rogers, for the Harvard University Press and released by Deberny & Peignot. In 1923, the typeface was also revived in England by Stanley Morison for the Brit-ish Monotype Company as part of its program of reviv-als. Most recently, the Baskerville typeface was used as the basis for the Mrs Eaves typeface in 1996, designed by Zuzana Licko.The font is used widely in documents issued by the Uni-versity of Birmingham. A modified version of Baskerville is also prominently used in the Canadian government's corporate identity program—namely, in the 'Canada' wordmark.

blockblock Baskerville

Regular and

Italic. The

difference in

proportions is

remarkable,

while the weight

perception is

almost the same