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John Baskerville
Baskerville in later life, oil on canvas by James Millar.
Born	(bap.) 28 January 1706 Wolverley, England
Died	8 January 1775 (age 69) Birmingham, England, at his home Easy Hill
Monuments	Industry and Genius
Occupation(s)	Manufacturer, printer and type designer

John Baskerville (28 January 1706 – 8 January 1775) was a Birmingham industrialist who became successful manufacturing japan ware. In middle-age, he turned his attention to printing. He produced books that were both technically innovative and of high quality although with limited commercial success. He remembered today as a typographer and one of the finest English printers of the 18th century. The typeface he designed for his books, now named Baskerville after him, fell into obscurity in the 19th century, but was revived in the early-20th. It and its derivatives are today widely used.

Early life

John Baskerville was born in the village of Wolverley in Worcestershire. His exact birth-date is unknown, but he was baptized on the 28 January 1706. Baskerville was the youngest child of a large family. The Baskervilles had been a prominent family in the area for two hundred years and Baskerville's father, also called John, was a prosperous farmer.

There are no records of Baskerville's early life aside from his baptism, although some have suggested he attended the nearby Sebright Grammar School. It has been claimed he worked for a time as the footman of a clergyman in Kings Norton, while also helping him teach writing to the young men of the parish. This is based on on an anecdote set down in 1806, decades after Baskerville's death, by the Rev. Mark Noble. However the Swedish astronomer Bengt Ferrner(in Swedish), who visited Baskerville in 1760, noted in his diary that his host was a former servant.

In 1726, aged about 20, Baskerville moved to Birmingham and worked as a writing master (a tutor of handwriting). He also offered his services as an engraver of gravestones. A small slate slab, held in the collection of the Library of Birmingham, has the inscription "Grave Stones Cut in any of the hands by John Baskerville Writing Master"; this may have been intended for display in a shop window as a sample and advertisement. In an 1820 book, the author Charles Pye noted that gravestones engraved by Baskerville were present at the churches of St Mary's, Handsworth and St Bartholomew's, Edgbaston. However, no grave monuments matching Pye's descriptions can be found at either church today.

Business career

In around 1736, Baskerville began working in the production of Japan-ware. This was the manufacture of wood, tin-plate or Papier-mâché, household articles that were decorated using layers of varnish that were heat-dried and polished. The result imitated lacquerware from east-Asia. Japanning was a significant industry in Birmingham at the time, being introduced to the city by one John Taylor. An apophrical story claims that Baskerville followed Taylor when he shopped for raw materials, in order to deduce how the process was carried out. Baskerville's business prospered and he gained a reputation for only recruiting the most skilled craftsmen and producing high-quality products. No examples of Baskerville's japan-ware are known to exist. Although this may be because his products were unmarked and surviving examples remain unrecognized.

A sign of his growing prosperity came in November 1747, when he signed a lease on eight acres of land on the north-east outskirts of Birmingham and spent over £400 building a house there. He named the estate "Easy Hill" and moved in in 1748. He would live there for the remainder of his life.

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Baskerville later devoted much time and energy to printing, but never ceased his involvement in the japan-ware business. In later years, his wife largely ran the enterprise.

Printing Career

Title page of the 1757 quarto edition of the works of Virgil

In the early 1750's, Baskerville began experiments in printing - these are described in a letter of October 1752 he sent to Robert Dodsley, one of the foremost publishers of the day.

He had his own printing press constructed that was of largely conventional design, but much more precisely made than usual (he would eventually have four printing presses in use). He used brass for some components, including the Platen, that in other printing presses were typically made of wood. He experimented with his own ink formulation; He was also starting to experiment with font design and his 1752 letter to Dodsley described his progress with a Great primer font.

In 1754, Baskerville distributed specimen pages and a prospectus for his first book, inviting subscriptions for a proposed Latin Quarto edition of the complete works of Virgil. After some delays, this volume finally appeared in 1757. As with Baskerville's later books, the 1757 Virgil is notable for its sparse design. Unlike most expensively printed books of the time, it lacked illustrations or ornamentation. Baskerville's intention was to maximize the contrast of the text to for the sake of clarity. After printing, the sheets (dampened for printing) were subjected to heat and pressure using hot copper sheets. This had the effect of setting the ink, smoothing the paper and giving it a slight gloss. Baskerville's characters were lighter and more delicate than those of other printers and his printing type would give satisfactory results without employing his other printing innovations. The Virgil was also the first book to be printed on the newly-invented Wove paper, rather than the traditional laid paper, although Baskerville only use wove paper for three of his books, the great majority were printed on laid paper.

The result attracted both praise and criticism. According to Thomas Macaulay, Baskerville's books "went forth to astonish all the librarians of Europe." Commentators admired the dark colour of his ink and noted the gloss of his paper, which was said to give the impression of being made of silk rather than linen. The contrast between the text and the paper appeared so striking at the time that some critics claimed reading Baskerville's books was actually harmful to the eyes.

--- the four volume Milton --- although the criticism is unfounded as examination of surviving copies of Baskerville's Milton does not reveal the errors that "eee" claimed to be present.

Printer the University of Cambridge

A page of the Book of Micah from the 1763 folio Bible.

On 16 December, 1758, Baskervilled became printer to the University of Cambridge with permission to print two editions of the Book of Common Prayer and one edition of the King James Bible. Then (and now), only the Universitys of Oxford and Cambridge, together with the Royal Printer, held letters patent from the Crown, authorizing them (and any they appointed) to print these books.

Baskerville had been planning an edition of the Book of Common Prayer even before his Virgil was published, having had the idea of printing a prayer book in a large format, "calculated for people who begin to want Spectacles, but are ashamed to use them in Church". His appointment by the University was, in effect, simply a license to print these books, for which the University demanded a substantial payment (£20 per 1000 copies of the first prayer book and £12 for the smaller second edition) Baskerville did not have sole rights and the University continued to print many thousands of copies of its own edition of the Book of Common Prayer.

Two thousand copies of the first (octavo) edition of The Book of Common Prayer were issued in 1760, and 4000 copies of second edition, in a smaller duodecimo format, printed in 1761. In 1763, Baskerville printed 1250 copies of the two-volume Bible in folio format. This included annotations and commentary and used text that had been reviewed by Francis Sawyer Parris The edition was notable for the lack of ornamentation in the design, to avoid distracting the reader from the text. The Baskerville Bible has since been described as one of the finest books to have been ever printed in Britain, and one of the great Bibles of all time, but at the time the volumes were expensive and slow sellers.

The licensing costs, together with the fact Baskerville had to equip a printing workshop in Cambridge to do the work, meant the venture was not a financial success. In a letter to 1762 letter to Benjamin Franklin he complained that "Had I no other dependence than typefounding and printing, I must starve". Baskerville had borrowed money to fiance the printing of the Christian texts, but three years after printing, forty percent of the Bibles remained unsold and were disposed of to a London bookseller who sold them at a discount.

Baskerville as a typographer

Baskerville spent several years in the early 1750's perfecting his typeface, drawing and redrawing the characters many thousands of times before he had achieved effect he wanted. The actual steel type punches were cut by John Handy, who would remain in Baskerville's employment for 28 years. In his japanning business, Baskervile had the reputation of employing only the best craftsmen, and paying good wages to retain them so it is likely that Handy was likewise a skilled expert at his trade.

Baskerville's typeface is described by typographers as "transitional", in that it represented bridge between the older, heavier designs such as Caslon Old Face and the later lighter Didot, which was inspired by Baskerville.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dKeVor1olhkC&pg=PA40&dq=type+Baskerville+-Hound&hl=en&sa=X&ei=1SnAUs60I4mqhAfgjoGwDA&ved=0CD4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=eyes&f=false

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Personal life

Soon after Baskerville moved into Easy Hill, he was joined by Sarah Eaves. A married woman who, with her four children, had been abandoned and left penniless after her husband, Richard Eaves, had fled abroad to avoid imprisonment. She nominally took the role of housekeeper at Easy Hill, but lived with him for many years and would become informally known as "Mrs Baskerville". Although they only married in 1764, soon after the death of Richard Eaves.

Baskerville, an atheist, was buried at his own request, in unconsecrated ground in the garden of his house, Easy Hill. The house was one of several buildings destroyed by rioting mobs during the Priestley Riots of 1791.

When a canal was built through the land his body was placed in storage in a warehouse for several years before being secretly deposited in the crypt of Christ Church (demolished 1899), Birmingham. Later his remains were moved, with other bodies from the crypt, to consecrated catacombs at Warstone Lane Cemetery. Baskerville House was built on the grounds of Easy Hill.

Legacy

Industry and Genius, 1990, by David Patten, sculpture in Centenary Square

Baskerville's type punches and matrices were among the materials sold in 1779 for £3700 by his widow to Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, who was involved in setting up a printing company in Kehl in Baden-Durlach. The main purpose of the company was to print the 85 volumes that made up the complete works of Voltair, doing so in a jurisdiction outside of the control of the French Royalist government, although radical works by other authors were also printed.

in 1789, after the French Revolution, Beaumarchais took the Baskerville's punches and matrices to Paris. He died a year later and they came to be used to print the Gazette Nationale ou Le Moniteur Universal, a newspaper that became the official journal of the revolutionary government. For some years its masthead carried the imprint imprimé … avec les caractères de Baskerville. Other European typographers produced typefaces they were inspired by, or direct copies of, Baskerville's.

The revival of Baskerville in 1917, after the American typographer Bruce Rogers, then an advisor to Cambridge University Press discovered a sample in a Cambridge bookshop. After some detective work, he traced the original Baskerville punches to the Fonderie Bertrand in France. They were used to strike new matrices that the Harvard University Press began using it in 1919 upon his advice. In the 1920's Lanston Monotype Company, Stempel Type Foundry the Mergenthaler Linotype Company all released their own version of Baskerville Fonderie Bertrand presented the type punches to the University of Cambridge Library in 1953, where they remain to the present day.

A Portland stone sculpture of the Baskerville typeface, Industry and Genius, in his honour stands in front of Baskerville House in Centenary Square, Birmingham. It is by local artist David Patten.

In 1996, Zuzana Licko designed a transitional serif typefacebased on Baskerville. She name it Mrs Eaves as a tribute to Sarah Eaves.

References

Citations

Bibliography

• Benton, Josiah Henry (1914). John Baskerville: Type-founder and Printer, 1706–1775. Boston: Privately Printed.
• Black, Michael (2000). Cambridge University Press 1584-1984. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521664977.
• Gaskell, Philip (2011). John Baskerville: A Bibliography. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521170729,. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
• Haley, Alan (1992). Typographic Milestones. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0471288942.
• Lawson, Alexander (1990). Anatomty of a Typoface. David Godine. ISBN 0879233338.
• McKitterick, David (1998). A History of Cambridge University Press. Vol. 2 Scholarship and Commerce 1698-1872. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052130802X.
• Meynell, Francis (1952). "John Baskerville, Printer and Designer". Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. C (4877): 573–591. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Pye, Charles (1820). A Description of Modern Birmingham. J. M. Richardson : J. Lowe.
• Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Baskerville, John" . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

External links

• Birmingham City Council page on Industry and Genius (includes picture)
• Birmingham City Council page on Baskerville
• Revolutionary Players website
• Baskerville the Animated Movie
• Some typographical studies on the use of the Baskerville font (in French).

Category:1706 births Category:1775 deaths Category:English printers Category:English typographers and type designers Category:English atheists Category:People associated with the University of Cambridge Category:Associates of the Lunar Society of Birmingham