There are numerous individual facets of John Baskerville’s work which can be analyzed in detail to demonstrate his influence on the printing world, but it is the overall commitment he embodied in the development of both his type and craft which places him in history as a ‘complete’ printer. From ink to paper, layout and press procedure, he re-mastered every aspect of the process to properly exhibit the letters he designed which in turn changed the face of printing. With the release of his first work in 1757, Virgil’s Georgics, Baskerville was well on his way to replacing the “English public’s typographic taste” for the conventional Caslon old-style type (Lawson 175). As a consequence of this change in taste, Baskerville is credited with being the first ‘transitional’ printer, moving away from a tradition of beauty over function toward beauty and function. By the end of his formal career his magnum opus, the Folio Bible, printed for Cambridge University, would become one of the greatest editions of that work ever printed.
The lengths to which Baskerville went to display his type leads to a discussion about the formation of the type itself. His advancements were not only in the printing realm, but began with the very creation of his letters. Desiring a type which was easier to read, he re-invented the lettering style of the day, the old-style Caslon, making Baskerville – in Britain, at least – an “innovator of a new style and tradition of type-design” which “revolutionized the appearance of the printed page” (Pardoe 161).
For the better part of two centuries in Britain the roman and italic ‘letter’ had looked essentially the same with slight variations and improvements between generations of typographers (Pardoe 161). The changes which Baskerville introduced “abandoned” the traditional theories of lettering and “changed the relationship” between letter parts: the thick and the thin, the position of the thickest part as well as the serifs, all of which seem “minutiae; but type-design isa matter of minutiae” (Pardoe 161). Baskerville increased the contrast between the thick and thin line of a letter, opened up the rounded ‘bowl’ of curved letters carrying the curve higher toward the top and sharpened the serifs to make them “more noticeable” (Pardoe 163).
These same changes were applied to his italic type as well. Previously, italics had been based on hand-writing which utilized an “inflexible chisel-ended pen” for its execution whereas Baskerville’s italic matched much closer the look of the “sharp-pointed pen” which provided a “continuous-line quality” (Pardoe 164).
Despite their elegance, the most remarkable attribute of the original Baskerville types is their “regularity…a regularity no other type had ever possessed (Pardoe 164–65). So accustomed is today’s reader to letters resembling Baskerville’s in format, it can be easy to overlook the impact of his changes unless a book of his type and printing are compared to others of his period (ibid), not to mention those which came before him.
John Baskerville 