JOHN BASKERVILLE
From a picture after Miller in the National Portrait Gallery, London.Emery Walker Ph. x.
John Baskerville
JOHN BASKERVILLE
TYPE-FOUNDER
AND PRINTER
1706-1775
BY
Josiah Henry Benton, LL.D.
BOSTON
PRIVATELY PRINTED
1914
Copyright, 1914, by J. H. Benton
D. B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston
NOTE
I have, for some years, been interested in John Baskerville,and have collected his imprints. Knowing this fact, the Presidentof the Boston Society of Printers asked me to preparea paper on Baskerville, to be read at a meeting of the Societyon February 24, 1914. This I did, and that paperformed the basis of this little book.
J. H. B.
[Pg 1]
JOHN BASKERVILLE
John Baskerville, a great English type-founder andprinter, was born in January, 1706, and died in January, 1775,having lived nearly the full period of threescore years and ten.To understand him and what he did, we must know somethingof the time and place in which he lived. It was a time whenthe great middle classes of England were coming into power.The divine right of kings was destroyed at Culloden in 1745.England was slowly awakening from the deadly languor of thecorruption of Walpole’s government. Whitefield was preaching,and Wesley was preaching and organizing. The middle classesgrew stronger every day and kept Pitt, with his intense patriotismand extravagance, in power, in spite of the upper classes.The rule of England in the East began in 1757, when Clive,on June 23, fought the battle of Plassey. Frederick the Great,aided by the liberal subsidies of Pitt, fought the battle of Rossbachin November, 1757, and the battle of Minden in November,1759, thus laying the foundation of the German Empirewhich has always been at peace with England. The capture ofMontreal in 1760 established the English ascendancy in theNew World. During this period the English Empire came intobeing because of the rule of the commercial middle class.
Birmingham was even then a great middle-class town; a placeof about 30,000 inhabitants, noted for its varied manufactures,but more noted for its freedom, by which it seemed to havethe power of attracting within its boundaries artisans of everytrade and every degree of skill. It accorded almost perfect freedom