Baskerville

Designer/History

John Baskerville. Baskerville, who had made a fortune in japanning before turning to printing when in his midforties, was responsible for several advances in printing technology, improving press platens and packings, formulating darker and faster-drying inks, and inventing wove paper, which was smoother than the old laid papers with their vertical ribbing. all of this enabled him to employ a typeface with sharper definition and thinner elements than was previously possible. This marks the move from the "garalde" to the transitional faces.

Unfortunately, Baskerville could not compete economically with printers using the cheaper, established technology. His matrices were sold by his widow, and changes hands several times, disappearing into obscurity until they were rediscovered and made known by Bruce Rogers around 1920.

"Foundry" or "Fry" Baskerville is a later face based on the original Baskerville, which was cut by the Joseph Fry foundry in 1764. This cutting takes the face more in the direction of the Didots. Rogers used it for display with the original Baskerville as text font.

Baskerville, designed in 1754, is most known for its crisp edges, high contrast and generous proportions. The typeface was heavily influenced by the processes of the Birmingham-bred John Baskerville, a master type-founder and printer, who owed much of his career to his beginnings. As a servant in a clergyman’s house, it was his employer that discovered his penmanship talents and sent him to learn writing. Baskerville was illiterate but became very interested in calligraphy, and practised handwriting and inscription that was later echoed in strokes and embellishments in his printed typeface.

Baskerville is categorized as a transitional typeface in-between classical typefaces and the high contrast modern faces. At the time that John Baskerville decided to switch from owning a japanning business to a type foundry, Phillipe Grandjean’s exclusive Romain du Roi for Louis XIV had circulated and been copied in Europe. The mathematically-drawn characters felt cold, and prompted Baskerville to create a softer typeface with rounded bracketed serifs and a vertical axis.