Biography
The English engraver John Baskerville was born in 1706 in the village of Wolverley, near Kidderminster in Worcestershire. At seventeen, he was engraving tombstones. By the time he was twenty, he was teaching writing and bookkeeping and running an engraving business as well. At thirty-two, he took up the then-popular lacquering process that we call japanning, and that made him wealthy.
Baskerville was an early mentor to Matthew Boulton, who built Watt's steam engines. He was also a good friend of Benjamin Franklin, who visited him from time to time.
Baskerville was forty-four when he took up the business for which he's known today. He applied his uncommon engraving skill to printing and typography. After four years' work, he produced the first of the elegant Baskerville fonts. He developed a new and better ink; he exploited the recent invention of so-called woven paper; and he generally brought fine printing to new heights.
Cambridge University Press hired him as their printer, and there, in 1763, he printed his great masterpiece. After five years' labor, he produced what might have been the most beautiful Bible yet made. The contradiction was that Baskerville was an atheist! And he was no closet unbeliever. He was an outspoken iconoclast. He was also a member of the Royal Society of Arts, and an associate of some of the members of the Lunar Society. He directed his punch cutter, John Handy, in the design of many typefaces of broadly similar appearance.
He lived out of wedlock with his lifelong partner, Sarah. That passes virtually without comment today, but it was very radical for the eighteenth century. And he railed against religion.
Before he died in 1775, he stipulated that he should not be buried in consecrated ground. And here the fun begins. Where to put John Baskerville? First he was put in a mausoleum on his own land. But the house was wrecked during the Birmingham riots, and the land was sold. A developer eventually cut a canal through the property. In 1821, workmen found Baskerville's lead-lined coffin.
Since it couldn't be buried in any consecrated cemetery, it sat in a warehouse until a plumber put it use as a workbench. But that finally became too morbid even for him. The plumber cast about, trying to find a churchyard that would take the coffin.
At last, a bookseller came to his rescue. The fellow sneaked Baskerville into his family crypt at Christ Church. When the church was razed, Baskerville was moved from that consecrated spot to Warstone Lane Catacombs, a consecrated labyrinth where he remains today. And we're left with the oddest linguistic echoes.
Baskerville's work was criticized by jealous competitors and soon fell out of favor, but since the 1920s many new fonts have been released by Linotype, Monotype, and other type foundries – revivals of his work and mostly called 'Baskerville'. Baskerville’s most notable typeface Baskerville represents the peak of transitional typeface and bridges the gap between Old Style and Modern type design.
History of the Font
British printer John Baskerville of Birmingham created the types that bear his name in about 1754. An excellent text typeface, this Baskerville design has a delicacy and grace that come from long, elegant serifs and the subtle transfer of stroke weight from thick to very thin. The serifs of the lower-case letters are nearly horizontal, the letters are rounded, the stress almost vertical, and the serifs are slightly bracketed. Baskerville’s only disadvantage is that it needs wide letter spacing because of its rounded design and is therefore relatively uneconomical in the use of space. The high-contrast, sparkly look of ITC New Baskerville is well suited to longer texts and display uses.
John Quaranda did the ITC New Baskerville version in 1974. The ITC New Baskerville™ typeface family is a modern interpretation of the original types cut in 1762 by British type founder and printer John Baskerville. During the centuries since its creation, Baskerville has remained one of the world's most widely used typefaces.
During Baskerville’s lifetime his types had little influence in his home country. However, In 1758 Baskerville met Benjamin Franklin who returned to the US with some of Baskervilles’s type, popularising it through its adoption as one of the standard typefaces employed in federal government publishing. Franklin was a huge fan of Baskerville’s work, and in a letter to Baskerville (1760) he enthusiastically defends Baskerville’s types, recounting a discussion he had with an English gentleman who claimed that Baskerville’s ‘ultra-thin’ serifs and narrow strokes would blind its readers.
Franklin mischievously tore off the top of a Caslon specimen (to remove any mention of Caslon, of course), and showed it to the gentleman, claiming that it was the work of Baskerville. The gentleman examined the specimen, and thinking that it was indeed a Baskerville specimen, started to point out the worst features of ‘Baskeville’s’ type.
The first modern revival of Baskerville was in 1923, under the design direction of Stanley Morison for Monotype. This design was released in just two versions, roman and italic, and is still available as a digital font. In 1978, Mergenthaler Linotype Company released a revised and updated version of Baskerville that included additional weights with corresponding italics. Through a licensing arrangement with Linotype, ITC gained the rights to the family and released ITC New Baskerville in 1982. This release made the design’s roman, semi bold, bold and black weights (each with a corresponding italic) available to a much larger audience. The original Baskerville and its revivals share design traits with old style typefaces while foreshadowing the innovations of Didot and Bodoni. As with an old style, Baskerville’s serifs are heavily bracketed and its lowercase head-serifs are obliqued. Contrast in stroke weight is more pronounced than in Garamond or Caslon, yet it does not approach the extremes reached by Bodoni or Didot. As in a Didone, Baskerville’s weight stress is vertical – gone is the inclined axis of curves found in Bembo or Centaur.
Baskerville was created for setting books, and its modern revivals are ideally suited to the setting of continuous text. Magazines, booklets, brochures and pamphlets are natural uses. New Baskerville is also an exceptionally legible design, with a genial, attractive feel. More than merely easy to read, New Baskerville is inviting to the reader.
Now the New Baskerville family is available as a suite of OpenType Pro fonts. Graphic communicators can work with this versatile design while taking advantage of OpenType’s capabilities, including the automatic insertion of old style figures, ligatures and small caps. The New Baskerville Pro fonts also offer an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages.
Baskerville is obviously a serifed font. Serifed typefaces were popular much earlier than sans-serif typefaces and include semi-structural details on many of the letters. People often refer to them as feet, although that is in no way a proper anatomical term when referring to typography. Their are many different classifications for serifed typefaces, often named for their origins, including Grecian, Latin, Scotch, Scotch Modern, French Old Style, Spanish Old Style, Clarendon and Tuscan. Some of these classifications can also be placed into broader classifications of typography including the styles below.
ITC New Baskerville is a transitional font. In the last decade of the 17th century, after over 200 years in which the Old Style design had prevailed in Europe, a wind of change began to blow in France. Philippe Grandjean (1666-1714), a French typecutter, was commissioned to produce a new royal roman type, which was the Romain du Roi. Louis XIV for the Imprimerie Royale commissioned it in 1692. The Romain du Roi marked a significant departure from the former Old Style types and was much less influenced by handwritten letterforms. This was during the Age of the Enlightenment, marked by resistance to tradition, whether that be art, literature, philosophy, religion, whatever; so it’s no surprise that this same era should give birth to radically different types.
For the first time, the design of each letter had been based precisely on a square and its outline mathematically plotted on a grid to achieve a precise cutting. The type, completed in 1702, was sharply cut and had a combination of new features – flat bracketed serifs, a narrower set, good contrast in the width of the thick and thin strokes of letters, and the stress more vertically inclined. The serifs are well defined but shallower and less triangulated than many of their predecessors. The term Transitional was adopted because it was between Old Style and Modern in design. John Baskerville made England’s first original contribution to the design of roman types. His types designs greatly influenced foundries in Europe. His types were not fully appreciated until the early 20th century when Bruce Rogers (1870-1957), the American book and type designer, rediscovered them.
History of the World
Jan 13th - Battle between jobless & police in NYC, 100s injuried
Jan 13th - US troops land in Honolulu to protect the king
Jan 24th - Mussorgsky's opera "Boris Godunov," premieres in St Petersburg
Feb 21st - Oakland Daily Tribune begins publication
Apr 5th - Johann Strauss Sr's opera "Die Fledermaus," premieres in Vienna
Apr 5th - Birkenhead Park, the first civic public park, is opened in Birkenhead.
May 9th - The first horse-drawn bus makes its début in the city of Mumbai, plying two routes.
May 14th - 1st admission charge at a football game, Harvard beats McGill 3-0
May 14th - Harvard beats U of McGill (Montreal) in football, 3-0
Jun 22nd - Game of lawn tennis introduced
Jun 29th - Greek politician Charilaos Trikoupis publishes a manifesto in the Athens daily Kairoi entitled "Who's to Blame?" in which he lays out his complaints against King George. He is elected Prime Minister of Greece the next year.
Jul 1st - 1st US kidnapping for ransom, 4-year-old Charles Ross, $20,000
Jul 1st - 1st US zoo opens (Philadelphia)
Jul 12th - Start of Sherlock Holmes Adventure, "Gloria Scott" (BG)
Jul 23rd - Aires de Ornelas e Vasconcelos is appointed the Archbishop of the Portuguese colonial enclave of Goa.
Sep 1st - 28th Postmaster General: Marshall Jewell of Conn takes office
Sep 1st - Sydney General Post Office opens in Australia
Sep 3rd - The congress of the state of México elevates Naucalpan to the category of Villa, with the title of "Villa de Juárez".
Nov 19th - William Marcy "Boss" Tweed, of Tammany Hall (NYC) convicted of defrauding city of $6M, sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment
Nov 25th - The United States Greenback Party is established as a political party consisting primarily of farmers affected by the Panic of 1873.
Bibliography
The Complete Typographer. Perfect, Christoper. Austen, Jeremy. 1992.
Hill, Will. The Complete Typographer. Third Edition. United Kingdom: Quarto Publishing, 2010.
http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/recentreleases/2009/itcnewbaskervillepro.htm
http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/adobe/itc-new-baskerville/
http://ilovetypography.com/2008/01/17/type-terms-transitional-type/
