Birmingham 1705 - London (?) 1775

He was accused of being eccentric for his unrelenting perfectionism. Accused of being immoral for flaunting social conventions. And, most injurious to him, accused of creating type that was "unattractive and painful."

Before John Baskerville decided to transform his love of letterforms into an amateur pursuit, the art of book-printing and type-creation had remained essentially unchanged since Gutenberg's time.

Baskerville turned the creative process on its head:he designed his namesake typeface not in accordance with the technological capabilities available to him, but rather to suit his particular aesthetic sensibilities. He then proceeded to redesign the printing press, papermaking and paper-finishing to accommodate the reproduction of his type.

Baskerville's type was unlike anything that had come before it. Considered by contemporary historians to be the quintessential example of a transitional face, it featured rounded characters, a perpendicular axis, strong contrasts between thicks and thins and very fine, sharp serifs, all of which clearly distinguished it from the old-style faces it followed.

John Baskerville started his professional career as a parish school writing master and later became a headstone engraver, two professions which allowed him to demonstrate his manual dexterity and technical proficiency. However, it was in japanning the craft of covering metal household items with multiple coats of varnish and finishing them with decorative paintings that he made his fortune. When he turned his attention to type and printing, he was already a successful businessman.

He therefore had the luxury of working at leisure, and this freedom allowed him to indulge his fanatical meticulousness. It took John Baskerville six years to complete the drawings for his type and another two to oversee its cutting. When finished, he discovered that conventional printing presses could not adequately capture its subtleties and redesigned his own. In place of wood, he used a machined brass bed and platen and a smooth vellum tympan (a sheet that was placed between the impression surface and the paper to be printed) packed with fine cloth to ensure that the two planes of the press met more evenly.

Most paper used in the mid-18th century was made on crude wire mesh molds that left deep vertical ribbed impressions. This too was unsuitable for capturing the delicacy of Baskerville's type.

Setting up a mill on his own land in Birmingham, Baskerville manufactured what we today refer to as wove paper, made on very fine meshes that resulted in smooth, silky stock. To further polish its surface, he created a device consisting of two heated copper cylinders between which he pressed his paper after printing it.

John Baskerville is frequently referred to as the inventor of wove paper, although there is evidence that others used it before him. What is known is that he was greatly envied for his inks. During the period in which he lived, printers made their own inks, and their proprietary formulas were highly guarded trade secrets.

Baskerville invented an ink that was both quick-drying, allowing him to print the reverse sides of his paper faster, and uncommonly rich, black and lustrous in appearance.

Baskerville's insistence on doing things his own way was manifested in all areas of his life. For many years he lived with a woman who, while abandoned by her husband, was still legally married to him (though it should be noted that when Sarah Eaves' husband died, John Baskerville married her without delay). He was a proud man, one who did not feign humility about his technological achievements. And perhaps most damning, he was a vocal and highly critical agnostic.

While printers and type founders in England claimed that the combination of fine type printed on smooth, reflective paper made his books difficult to read, John Baskerville's efforts were praised by his peers in both Continental Europe and the United States. Printing and typographic luminaries no less than Ben Franklin and Giambattista Bodoni were great admirers and lively correspondents.

Unfortunately, encouragement alone was not enough to prevent Baskerville from losing a considerable amount of money on his hobby, and after creating his masterpiece, a folio bible printed for Cambridge University in 1763, he spent the remainder of his life trying to dispose of his equipment. Four years after his death, Baskerville's wife sold it to a French dramatist who used it to print the works of Voltaire in Germany, then brought the punches and matrices with him to France. They changed hands many times, losing their value as popular taste in type moved away from classic faces. However, the classic roman type revival in the beginning of this century lead by England's Lanston Monotype Corporation resulted the successful introduction of Baskerville to a new era of book designers in 1923. Thirty years later, the Paris type foundry Deberny et PeignotÊÊthe penultimate in a long succession of Baskerville's original punches to the Cambridge University Press as a gesture of goodwill. After almost two centuries of neglect, Baskerville's handiwork was back on English soil and his type universally appreciated for its beauty, elegance and versatility.