A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898

by Henry R. Plomer

At length, in 1741, Robert Foulis set up as a bookseller in Glasgow. In some of his earlier publications will be found lists of books printed and sold by him, which are very interesting. One of these, which enumerates fifteen books, includes a Greek Testament, Buchanan's edition of the Psalms, Burnet's Life of the Earl of Rochester, seven or eight classics, among which were a Cicero, Juvenal, Cornelius Nepos, Phædrus, and Terence, and two of Tasso's works. The Terence was printed for him by Robert Urie, and shows some excellent founts of small italic and Roman. Robert Foulis seems to have begun printing on his own account in 1742, and among his earliest patrons was Professor Hutcheson, for whom he printed a treatise entitled Metaphysicæ Synopsis, a duodecimo of ninety pages, and a work on Moral Philosophy of three hundred and thirty pages. He also printed in the same year the second and third editions of a sermon preached by William Leechman before the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr, The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, and editions of Cicero and Phædrus. All these were in duodecimo or small octavo, printed in a clear readable type, that probably came from Urie's foundry. On the 31st March 1743, Robert Foulis was appointed printer to the University of Glasgow, and published Demetrius Phalerus de Elocutione in two sizes, quarto and octavo. This was the first book printed at Glasgow in Greek type, the Greek and Latin renderings being printed on opposite pages—the Latin in a fount of English Roman that cannot be distinguished from Caslon's letter, while the italic also has a strong resemblance to that of the English founder. Among other productions of the year 1743 was a specimen of another Glasgow man's work, Bishop Burnet's translation of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, to which was prefixed Holbein's portrait of the great Chancellor.

In 1744 Dr. Andrew Wilson, who for some years had been furnishing Scotch and Irish printers with types from his foundry, moved to Camlachie, a spot within a mile of Glasgow, and at once began to furnish letter for Robert Foulis. In the same year Robert took his brother Andrew into partnership, and the firm quickly became famous for the beauty and correctness of their classics, beginning with the edition of Horace, which, from the fact of its having only six errors in the text, was christened the immaculate. Other attractive books were the Sophocles of 1745, quarto; Cicero in twenty volumes, small octavo; the small folio edition of Callimachus, which took the silver medal offered in Edinburgh for the finest book of not fewer than ten sheets; the magnificent Homer, which Reed in his Old English Letter Foundries describes as 'for accuracy and splendour the finest monument of the Foulis press.' But the Foulis press did not confine itself to classics only. It published several fine editions of English authors, among them a folio edition of Milton's Paradise Lost, and editions of the poems of Gray and Pope. In 1775 Andrew Foulis died suddenly. The blow was very severely felt by his brother, and coming as it did upon the failure of his Academy of Arts, completely crushed him. He removed his art collection to London for sale; but here another disappointment awaited him—the sum realised after paying expenses being fifteen shillings. He returned to Edinburgh, and was on the point of starting for Glasgow when he died on the 2nd June 1776. The Foulis press was carried on by the younger Andrew Foulis until the end of the century.

In England, the chief event of this period was the appearance of John Baskerville at Birmingham.

No satisfactory biography of Baskerville has yet been written, but the best sketches of his life are those by the late T. B. Reed in his History of the Old English Letter Foundries (chap, xiii.), which contains some highly interesting and valuable correspondence between Baskerville and his publisher, R. Dodsley, and the more recent article in the Dictionary of National Biography, from the pen of Mr. Tedder.

John Baskerville was born in 1706 at Wolverley, a village in Worcestershire. No one has discovered where he was educated: yet this is one of the points upon which we should like to know something, because it is generally admitted that he was a very beautiful writer; indeed, it was to his love of calligraphy that we owe the regular and well-proportioned letters associated with his name. For some time he earned his living as a writing-master; after which he appears to have gone into the japanning trade, and in 1750 embarked some capital in a letter foundry. Another point upon which his biographers are silent is the place where he learnt the art of printing. For we know that the punches of his foundry were not cut by himself, and that he was not in any sense a practical printer; yet he must have obtained some knowledge of the rudiments of the art before taking over the responsibilities of a foundry of his own. Baskerville appears to have employed the most skilled artists he could obtain, and it is said that he spent upwards of £600—some say £800—before he obtained a fount to suit him. His letters to Dodsley show how anxious he was to attain perfection. The result of all this care and labour was shown in the quarto edition of Virgil which appeared in 1757, and was followed by quarto editions of Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

The appearance of Baskerville's publications gave rise to no little controversy. By some they were hailed with unstinted praise; while others, such as Mores and Dr. Bedford, looked upon them with something little short of contempt. Yet it is difficult to understand the grounds of these adverse criticisms. As regards type, there is very little to choose between Caslon's Roman and that of Baskerville, while the italic of Baskerville was unquestionably the most beautiful type that had ever been seen in England; and the ridiculous criticism passed on it that its very fineness was injurious to the eyesight, was shown to be utterly worthless by Franklin's letter to the printer, which is printed in Reed's Old English Letter Foundries. But there are also other features of excellence about these books of Baskerville's. They are simplicity itself. There is not a single ornament or tail-piece introduced into them to divide the attention. The books were printed with deep and wide margins, and the lines were spaced out with the very best effect.

The first public body to recognise Baskerville's ability was the University of Oxford, which in July 1758 empowered him to cut a fount of Greek types for 200 guineas. This order proved to be beyond his power. It is generally admitted that his Greek type was a failure, and he wisely made no further attempts at cutting learned characters. Some of the punches of Baskerville's Greek types are still preserved at Oxford, and are the only specimens of his foundry that we have.

In his Preface to Paradise Lost, Baskerville stated that the extent of his ambition was to print an octavo Prayer Book and a folio Bible. In connection with this ambition, he applied to the University of Cambridge for appointment as their printer, a privilege which was granted to him, but at the cost of such a heavy premium that he obtained no pecuniary profit from it. The Prayer Book printed in two forms appeared in 1760, and the same year saw the prospectus and specimen of the Bible issued, the Bible itself appearing in 1763 in imperial folio. Both are beautiful specimens of the printer's art.

But Baskerville soon became disgusted with the ill-natured criticism to which he was subjected, coupled with the failure of booksellers to support him, and was anxious to have done with the business. The year before the publication of the Bible, he wrote to Horace Walpole a letter given by Reed (p. 278) in which he says that he is sending specimens of his foundry to foreign courts in the hope of finding among them a purchaser for the whole concern, and during the next few years he was in correspondence with Franklin with the same object. Fortunately for his country, these attempts were unsuccessful during his life-time, and between the years 1760-1773 he produced not only several editions of the Bible and Common Prayer, but the works of Addison, 4 vols. 1761, 4to; the works of Congreve, 3 vols. 1761, 8vo; Æsop's Fables; and in 1772 a series of the classics in quarto, which, Reed says, 'suffice, had he printed nothing else, to distinguish him as the first typographer of his time' (p. 281).