John Baskerville, type-founder and printer, 1706-1775

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
I have, for some years, been interested in John Baskerville, and have collected his imprints. Knowing this fact, the President of the Boston Society of Printers asked me to prepare a paper on Baskerville, to be read at a meeting of the Society on February 24, 1914. This I did, and that paper formed the basis of this little book.
J. H. B.
John Baskerville, a great English type-founder and printer, 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 something of the time and place in which he lived. It was a time when the 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 the corruption of Walpole’s government. Whitefield was preaching, and Wesley was preaching and organizing. The middle classes grew stronger every day and kept Pitt, with his intense patriotism and 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 Rossbach in November, 1757, and the battle of Minden in November, 1759, thus laying the foundation of the German Empire which has always been at peace with England. The capture of Montreal in 1760 established the English ascendancy in the New World. During this period the English Empire came into being because of the rule of the commercial middle class.
Birmingham was even then a great middle-class town; a place of about 30,000 inhabitants, noted for its varied manufactures, but more noted for its freedom, by which it seemed to have the power of attracting within its boundaries artisans of every trade and every degree of skill. It accorded almost perfect freedom to all. Dissenters, Baptists, Methodists, Roman Catholics, Jews, Quakers, and heretics of all sorts were welcomed, and were undisturbed in their religious observances. No trades unions, no trade guilds, no companies existed. The system of apprentices was only partially known. Every man was free to come and go, to found, or to follow, or to leave a trade, just as he chose. Birmingham was emphatically the town of free trade, where no restrictions, commercial or municipal, existed.