John Baskerville Research Paper

John Baskerville

By; Shaina Flatow

John Baskerville started the transitional style serif fonts with his Baskerville font. He opened the door to the modern style of fonts and implemented many changes to the printing and typesetting industry that is still felt today. It is hard to find a graphic designer today that doesn’t use his font or a font based of his. He was born on January 28, 1706 in Wolverley, Worcestershire, England. He was originally a writing master and stone engraver. In 1726 he moved to Birmingham where he set up a school teaching writing and book-keeping, and he continued to work as an engraver. Birmingham is described by Josiah Benton in his book John Baskerville as “a place of about 30,000 inhabitants, noted for its varied

He had started an almost herculean quest for perfection, wherein he had a hand in almost every stop of the process innovating and searching for new methods to produce a cleaner smoother page. The major innovations he used and created started with a change in the construction of the printing press by inventing a flatter sturdier bed so that he could create crisper more even letters. Then he created a new ink one that was blacker, shiner, richer, more even and faster drying. He was the first person “to exploit commercially James Whatman’s invention of wove paper, which was much smoother than the traditional laid paper; and he modified the printing process by using heated copper cylinders to dry the ink before it had time to soak too far into the paper” (Bob Miles, 2002). His quest for perfection took him seven years to print his first book, but it also meant that he could print typefaces with thinner cleaner more elegant

In his lifetime he printed fifty some odd other works including: Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and Book of Common Prayer. Something that was unique to John Baskerville’s printing house, was that he had a hand in and was responsible for every stage of the books production. With some of his books he started by commissioning a scholar to write the book he wanted to publish. Then they created they ink and paper. They then did every stage of printing and finishing the book and the sheets. Only binding was left up to the bookseller or in cases of more affluent clients the customers. Baskerville’s quest for perfection made him lose a lot of money in the printing business, he crated work at a quality that made his books price above the cost that people were willing to pay for a book. He almost always lost money on every