The Cambridge Cult of the Baskerville Press

This chapter considers an early impetus in the Baskerville revival: the Baskerville Club, whose work encouraged the ‘fashionable Cambridge cult of the Baskerville press.’ The Baskerville Club was established in 1903 by a small group of Cambridge librarians, bibliographers and bibliophiles brought together through a common concern for the printer’s books. The Baskerville Club was probably the earliest gathering of what can loosely be described as Baskerville scholars, or if not Baskerville scholars as such, at least academics who had been brought together through a mutual interest in the printer and his books, each with a common desire to raise awareness of his publications, and to contribute to an understanding of his work. The Club’s primary publication, the No 1 Handlist, provided an early indication of the level of complexity and confusion attached to describing Baskerville’s books: problems experienced, but not wholly solved, by the printer’s subsequent bibliographers. This chapter explores the degree to which the Club spearheaded the twentieth-century revival of interest in Baskerville; its role in laying the foundations upon which subsequent scholarly Baskerville activity has been built; and the extent to which it influenced the development and progress of bibliographical studies.

Place, Home and Workplace

John Baskerville’s place of birth in Wolverley, Worcestershire and the buildings where he lived and worked in Birmingham have never been subjected to systematic historical investigation. This chapter attempts to address this omission and is divided into two parts: ‘A New Birthplace for John Baskerville’ and ‘The Buildings of John Baskerville in Birmingham’. A combination of archival research, topographical analysis and archaeological evidence is used to provide a clearer picture of where he was born and the location and nature of his residences and business premises. New Baskerville material corrects traditional accounts and enhances our knowledge and understanding of his background in Wolverley and Birmingham. His modest rather than previously supposed gentry status in Wolverley helps explain why he left for Birmingham and perhaps why he revealed little of his origins once he had established himself as one of the town’s leading industrialists. The uncovering of the sequence of his places of work and residence in Birmingham charts his rise to become one of the leading printers of the time, casting light on the manner of this progress and the opportunities available to an able and ambitious young man newly arrived in a rapidly industrialising town.

After the ‘Perfect Book’

This chapter examines the history of publications printed in Baskerville type by English printers other than John Baskerville himself. During Baskerville’s lifetime, his foreman Robert Martin was the only printer to use the type when he assumed temporary management of the press at Easy Hill between 1767 and 1771. Following Baskerville’s death in 1775, his widow Sarah used it to print two books herself, whilst several other Birmingham printers (Robert Martin again, Christopher Earl, Thomas Chapman, James Bridgwater, the bookselling partnership of Pearson and Rollason and James Smith who published in Newcastle-under-Lyme) published a range of books during the next two decades with Baskerville founts obtained from an auction. Some doubtful or unattributed publications in Baskerville type are noted and discussed as well as some London publications printed in the fraudulent ‘Fry’s Baskerville’ font.

John Baskerville the Writing Master

Baskerville was, originally, both a teacher of writing and a carver of headstones, the main evidence for his skills is a slate that hangs in the Library of Birmingham advertising Baskerville’s services in writing and letter-carving. In the archives there are also examples of Baskerville’s handwriting, which survive in letters to friends and acquaintances. These letters have previously been examined simply for the light they shed on his relationships and business. Baskerville’s hand, however, has neither been scrutinised for its style nor assessed in regard to his typeface. This chapter considers both Baskerville’s handwriting and his lettering and presents the evidence for his relationship with the writing masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In doing so, it sheds new light on the antecedents of Baskerville’s typeface and demonstrates, in particular, how his handwriting influenced the design of his printing type.

John Baskerville

Although Baskerville was as important a japanner as he was a printer, this aspect of his work has been largely overlooked. As one of the earliest japanners in Birmingham he played a crucial role in establishing the English Midlands as a leading centre for the manufacture of japanned goods. He produced high quality decorative wares which, appealing to a fashionable market, provided a lucrative income without which he could not have indulged his primary interest in printing. None of his japanned ware is known to have survived but from the detail of his patent of 1742 – the first ever granted in respect of japanning – and from contemporary records left by those who visited Birmingham to see the wonders of its new factories and industrial processes, it is evident that many fine examples of japanned iron made between c1738 and c.1773 and found in public and private collections today may, indeed, have been made in Baskerville’s workshops.

The Topographies of a Typographer

The chapter considers the ways in which Baskerville has been interpreted since the eighteenth century. Celebrated as a genius by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians of Birmingham, he was, however, criticised by others for his allegedly lowly origins, lack of education and unconventional morality and beliefs. The revival of interest in the quality of his typeface design at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to biographies and bibliographical studies which added to our knowledge of his work as a ‘complete printer’. These were important studies, but they resulted in a narrowing of our appreciation of Baskerville. He became, almost entirely, the subject of students of printing and book design and was largely ignored by economic, social and cultural historians. Baskerville’s importance as an industrialist, contributor to the Enlightenment and the significance of his books as cultural artefacts provide new ways of seeing the man and his works.

Introduction

BASKERVILLE, with its well-considered ‘proportions and design, its methods of thickening or thinning parts of a letter, and its sharper and more horizontal treatment of serifs’,1 is one of the world’s most widely used, enduring and influential typefaces. It was created by John Baskerville (1707–75), a printer, entrepreneur and artist who changed the course of type design and made eighteenth-century Birmingham a town without typographic equal....

The ‘Baskerville Bindings’

This chapter analyses the bindings found on books printed by John Baskerville and presumably produced in his own bindery. John Baskerville dedicated most of his life to many aspects of the book production and probably extended this dedication to the binding of his books. Although known for primarily selling his books in sheets, i.e. unbound, Baskerville appears to have been closely related to a bindery, a theory mainly based on a group of bindings sharing similar features (e.g. a specific marbled paper and a series of finishing tools used to decorate the covers). This chapter therefore includes images of most of these decorative tools, never reproduced in the literature so far, as well as other features that could allow this group of bindings to be clearly identified. In addition to the decorative features, this chapter also focuses on the description and interpretation of the structural details associated to these bindings, which reinforce the theory of a single bindery at work and the potential personal involvement of the printer in the binding of his printed work.

John Baskerville’s Decorated Papers

Disregarded by the eighteenth-century book trade and dismissed by subsequent paper historians, Baskerville’s end papers have generally been disdained as amateurish, inconsistent and lacking in both technical and aesthetic proficiency. This chapter, however, re-evaluates Baskerville’s marbled paper and suggests that the marbling was done in a novel and possibly ground-breaking manner for the period, using colours from Baskerville's japanning business. Rather than following popular European trends in marbling, may have been influenced by a lesser-known Ottoman Turkish form of marbling known as yazali-ebrû. The chapter concludes that Baskerville’s marbled paper should be viewed as a considered and reasoned trial rather than an unsophisticated and failed experiment, which, although unacceptable to the eighteenth-century eye, can now be understood as being ahead of its time.

Baskerville’s Birmingham

Using Peter Borsay's idea of an English Urban Renaissance, alongside other ideas including the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, this chapter discusses the context within which Baskerville and other provincial printers worked during the eighteenth century. The Printing (Licensing) Act had restricted printing to London, Oxford and Cambridge; its lapse in 1695 allowed printing to develop in other provincial towns, though London continued to dominate the trade. Birmingham, as a manorial town, was free of the trade restrictions which operated in incorporated towns and printers and other businessmen were free to set up in business without formality. The context of Birmingham as a developing industrial town is outlined and cultural aspects of the town's history are discussed.