JOHN
BASKERVILLE
The Development and Transformation of a
Man and a Typeface
January
28 1706
January
8
1775
Sion Hill Court Wolverly, Wocestershire, Village in Enlgand 1728 - John Baskerville senior mortgaged the Wolverley estate.
Sion Hill Court was the historic family seat of the Baskerville family from 1502 to 1760. John Baskerville, who owned the estate in the mid 1600s, was reputed to have purchased the carved panelled dresser, now part of the entrance Hall and dining room within Sion House. John Baskerville (1706-1755) is thought to have been born at Sion House.
1726
Moved to Birmingham and worked as a writing master and letter cutter of gravestones. He owed much of his career to his beginnings. it was through his employer that he learned writing. Baskerville was illiterate but became very interested in calligraphy, and practised handwriting and inscription that was later echoed in strokes in his printed typeface.
Ornate Script Roman
Blackletter Italic Capitols
A slate slab in Birmingham Central Library hidden away on the back of a pillar on the top floor contains various lettering. There are as yet, no known surviving examples of gravestones which were cut by Baskerville. It is plausible that the thin lines of Baskerville’s typeface came from the exigencies of lettering on stone.
1738
John began to experiment with japanning. This is how John aquired his fortune which allowed him to devoted his time and energy to printing and type.
Japanning is the application of black varnish to metal household objects 1742 Applied for and was granted the first patent for japanning (no. 582).
1747
John leased eight acres of land northeast of Birmingham where he built a house, ‘Easy Hill’ and workshops. He named it “Easy Hill,” and built a mansion on the land at a cost of what would be millions of dollars today. It was his little Eden. Sarah Eaves came to live with him as a housekeeper shortly after the purchase of Easy Hill, and for all intents and purposes, as a wife. They married in 1764, after her estranged husband, a convicted forger, died. 1791: ‘Easy Hill’ was burnt during the Priestley Riots.
The Perfectionist “ Having been an early admirer of the beauty of letters, I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them. I formed to myself ideas of greater accuracy than had yet appeared, and had endeavoured to produce a set of types according to what I conceived to be their true proportion. -Baskerville, published in preface of second book an edition of Milton, Anatomy of Type, pg. 185
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“
He has spared neither pains nor expense to bring them to the utmost pitch of perfection. The letters are cut with great daring and the italic is the best to be found in any English foudry, but the roman is alittle too wide. -PierreSimon Fournier, said of Baskerville, Anatomy of Type, pg. 188
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“
Had I no other dependence than type founding and printing, I must starve. -Baskerville wrote to Franklin in 1762, Anatomy of Type, pg 190
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Baskerville set out to improve the printing process,
from the presses he used to the paper and ink.
Little development had occurred in the printing process since Gutenburg.
William Caslon showing type specimen to King Edward IV and his Queen
WIlliam Caslon fonts were the dominant force in English typography, but Baskerville considered that their effect was consistiently ruined by bad printing. It was essential to him that a print foundry had its own printing press.
1750
Baskerville began working as a printer and typefounder.
Ink
Not unusual for one who was used to annalysizing the quality and nature of black ink in the japanning trade, Baskerville was deter mined to produced ink that was blacker than what was currently available. He perfected his formula and then allowed the ink to stand for three years before using it.
Press Alhough his press, constructed from wood, followed the standard model then employed by English printers, he invented two important changes in its design. First, he made the bed and the platen of machined brass, one inch thick. Next, instead of utilizing a soft packing, which would have produced too deep an impression of his types, Baskerville, used a tympan of smooth vellum, packed with superfine cloth.
Paper
Laid Paper Mold
The paper for printing up to Baskerville’s time was laid paper, in which the lines of the paper makers mold produced vertical ribs on the sheet. Baskerville attempted to obtain a smoother page by experimenting with the mold. The first use of it is on the Georgics, a book colkected for both it’s typography and paper.
Resulting Quality of Paper
Baskerville attempted to obtain a smoother page by experimenting with the mold. For a mold he a obtained a woven screen, which produced a new kind of paper lacking the laid lines.
Baskerville replaced the laid surface with one consisting of a fine brass screen composed of wires running in both directions, not unlike a modern window screen. It has since been called wove paper.
&
BASKERVILLE
The Font
1757
Release of Baskerville Font
It took three years to complete, but it made such an impact that he was appointed printer to the University of Cambridge the following year.
Baskerville directed his punchcutter, John Handy, in the design of many typefaces.
g
tail on lowercase g does not close
TEC
T has wide arms
Q
swash-like tail of Q
John J well below baseline Many version feature a calligraphic J
top and bottom serifs on C
A
long lower arm of E
high crossbar and pointed apex of A
Transitional
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890!@#$%^&*()_+?><”’/.,; ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890!@#$%^&*()_+?><”’/.,; ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890!@#$%^&*()_+?><”’/.,; ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890!@#$%^&*()_+?><”’/.,;
Roman Bold Italic
Italic Bold
One reason a typeface is considered a masterpiece is because the designer achived optical harmony in adhjusting the size and porportion of the parts not mathematically, but esthetically and perceptually. Baskerville is a typeface that is honored as a great tool of communication and work of art because a virtuoso designer poured heart, soul, and countless hours of work into creating harmounious relationships between letter forms. -Texts on type: Critical Writings on Typography, pg 37
Baskerville was known as a writing master of his time.
INFLUENCE BY William Caslon
OLD STYLE
Claude Garamond
INFLUENCE BY
First Transitional Phillipe GrandJean Romains Du Roi
perpendicular axis flatter and sharper serifs less bracketing
INFLUENCED Bodoni
Didot Modern Fonts
1757
Baskerville’s edition of Virgil printed. This introduced Baskerville’s type, used a distinctive black ink and was the first to be printed on high quality, woven paper. It was a significant leap forward in typographic design and printing. It is a book
collected for both it’s typography and paper.
Not content even with this surface, though, Baskerville took the extra step of hot-pressing his paper between plates of heated copper, which gave the paper a much smootherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;even glossyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;finish.
Despite many improvements to the printing process he was unable to profit from them. He was uable to compete with commercial book printers, his prices being two to threes times higher. A year later he produced a folio bible printed for Cambridge University. Today this is considered one of the finest books not only in the Eighteenth century but in English printing since William Coxton invented the first English press, five centuries ago. At the time it was not appreciated for itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s quality.
Baskervilleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s folio Bible printed.
1763
It was after the printing of his beautiful bible Baskerville was convinced that his high quality of printing was merely a luxury and spent the remainer of his life trying to sell his punch cuts, matrices and the rest of his printing equipment.
He died in 1775 in his â&#x20AC;&#x153;Easy Hillâ&#x20AC;? home.
1758 First meeting between Benjamin Franklin and Baskerville. They were the same age, worked as printers and radical thinkers. Franklin bought six copies of Baskervilles first published book Virgil.
1758
Fours years after his death his widow was able to find a purchaser, Caron de Beumarchais, a French dramatist, who wanted the Baskerville equipment for printing an edition of the works of Voltaire. When this work was off the press at Kehl, Germany, in 1789 Beaumarchais took the punches and matrices to Paris, where he established a typefoundary. He died a year later.
1789
1893
The Baskerville punches then changed hands numerous times before eventually ending up at the Paris type foundary Bertrand in 1893. Their exalted lineage at this time was unknown adn even if they had known it would not have made much of a difference to printers as classic letterforms were not as appreciated at this time.
At the turn of the century, the private press movement created a great regeneration of the art of the printed book. There was a similar feeling of discontent with the quality of books in the late 19th century as there was in other decorative arts. Book production had become mechanised during the Victorian period (1837â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 1901). Producers of private press books revived the craft of book making. They sourced hand-made paper, high quality inks, bookbinding, and book coverings were made in traditional vellum and has elaborately tooled leather covers.
1900
1919
The revival of the Baskerville type was prompted by the distinguished American Typographer , Bruce Rogers. While serving as advisor to Cambridge University press in 1917, Rogers discovered a specimen of Baskerville and traced it orgins to Fonderie Bertrand in France. When he became printing advisor to Harvard University Press, he reccommended the purchase and use of Baskrvilles types that had been cast from the original.
The type again became known when the Lanston Monotype Corporation of London began its program of reviving a number of classic roman types. Baskerville was cut in 1923.
1923
1926
Stempel typefoundary in Frankfurt, Germany, produced a copy, which was also used by German Linotype Company a year later.
Mergenthaler Linotype in England and the United States bourght out a version in 1931. Intertype Baskerville also became available this year.
1931
Book typographers rapidly made the revival a resounding success, and they have continued to favor the type and before long Baskerville became one of the most widely used types.
1925
Baskerville made its first appareance in the American Institute of Graphic Artsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Fifty Books of the Year Exhibition in 1925 and it has been absent from the list only one year since (1927).
Charles Peignot, representing the Paris type foundary Debern et Peignot, the last commercial owner of the historic font, returned the original punches to English soil in 1953, making them a gift to Cambridge University Press.
1953
Baskerville
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Fry Baskerville, Baskerville Foundary ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz More dramatic line weight differences,
CC Q Q 1768
C does not have two serifs, Q swash is varied
gg
Fry Baskerville was created by Isaac Moore in 1768, the version first issued by the Fry type foundry, established by the Fry family after they succeeded in the chocolate business.
The most recent redesign of Baskerville was published and designed by Zuzana Licko in 1996, and licensed by Emigre, a typefoundry run by Licko and husband Rudy VanderLans.
1996
Lickoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s design is unorthodox and not a pure revival. In creating it, she was influenced by how it would be printed by contrast to printing in Baskervilleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time: considering the flatness of offset lithography in comparison to letterpress printing, and the resolution of set devices and onscreen display.
The overall stroke weight of Mrs Eaves is considerably heavier than most other revivals, countering the often anemic reproduction of smaller point sizes in other digital revivals of Baskerville, and restoring some of the feeling of letterpress printingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unpredictability. To compensate for this and create a brighterlooking page, Licko lowered the x-height, reducing the amount of space taken up by ink on the page
Timeless https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_dy_yMf0pE-
Courtney Sehn
Bibliography Lawson, Alexander. “Baskerville.” Anatomy of A Typeface. Boston: David R. Godine, 2005. 184-193. Print. I used the Anatomy of a typeface for details about Baskerville’s life, including information about japanning, type and process development, and for information about Baskervilles death and waht happened to his type after he died. “Font Designer – Isaac Moore.” Isaac Moore. Web. 28 Apr. 2015. <http://www.linotype.com/497/isaacmoore.html>. I used this source for more inforamtion about Fry Baskerville. Baines, Phil and Andrew Haslam. Type and Typography Second Edition. Pg. 92. Waston- Guptill Publications, New York. 2005. I uesd this source for an image of Baskervilles remaining punches and for information about his type punches. Loxley, Simon. “The Maverick Tendency: The Type and Strange Afterlife of John Baskerville.” Type the Secret History of Letters. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004. 43-54. Print. I used this source for more detials about BAskerville’s life, afterlife, printing process development and type development. “Timeline: John Baskerville.” The Typographic Hub. Dr Caroline Archer. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. <http://www.typographichub.org/ baskerville-society/entry/time-line/>. I used this source for dates and a basic timeline for Baskervilles life. Morris, Errol. “Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth (Part 2).” Opinionator Hear All Ye People Hearken O Earth Part 2 Comments. The New York Times, 9 Aug. 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2015. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/hear-all-ye-people-hearkeno-earth-part-2/?_r=0>. I used this source for inforamtion about Easy Hill, Japanning, John’s relationship with Sarah Eaves. “Check out This Property for Sale on Rightmove!” Rightmove.co.uk. Andrew Grant, 6 Nov. 2014. Web. 28 Apr. 2015. <http://www. rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-49031810.html> I used this source for information about John’s birth home. Christensen, Thomas. “Typeface: Baskerville.” Typeface: Baskerville. The Typehead Chronicles: Baskerville. Web. 28 Apr. 2015. <http:// www.rightreading.com/typehead/baskerville.htm>. I used this source for inforamtion about identifying font characteristics, japaning info and printing process innovation and the Mrs. Eaves typeface.