Yʳ most obedient
and most humble Servant
John Baskerville
PS. The folding of the Specimens will be taken out by laying them a short time between damped Papers. NB. the Ink, Presses, Chases, Moulds for casting & all the apparatus for printing were made in my own Shops.
This letter is interesting as showing not only the embarrassments under which Baskerville labored, but the relation which existed between the type-founder and printer and the member of Parliament at that time. Baskerville was a British tradesman, and dearly loved anybody that was in power. Nothing came of this letter. I cannot ascertain that Walpole paid any attention to it. Baskerville then went to Paris to endeavor to sell his letter-founding and printing establishment. He asked £8000, which was declined as being too much. Negotiations were again renewed, in 1765, through the medium of Franklin, who was in Paris, and the price was reduced to £6000. But Franklin wrote that the French government was too poor to buy it; that they had not money enough to keep their public buildings in repair, and so nothing came of the attempt to sell during Baskerville’s life. Upon his death his widow advertised the business for sale, and stated at the same time that she continued the business of letter-founding in all parts. Apparently she received no offer, and on December 11, 1775, she advertised all the printing material for sale at auction on the third of January, 1776, saying that it consisted of “Four accurate improved Printing Presses; several large Founts of Type, different Sizes; with Cases, Frames, screwed Chases, and every other useful Apparatus in that Branch of Trade.” For some reason this auction was postponed until April 1, when a few founts of type were sold. Apparently the printers were afraid of the popular prejudice against Baskerville’s type.
It was then suggested by Dr. Harwood, the distinguished bibliographer, that the nation should purchase the types as a nucleus of a national typography, which he wished to see established. Unfortunately his efforts came to nothing, and then Mrs. Baskerville advertised the types for sale again, saying that she would “conform to sell them at the same Prices with other Letter founders.” Only one purchaser appears to have embraced this offer, Mr. James Bridgewater, who printed an edition of Hervey’s “Meditations” “with a new type cast on purpose by Mrs. Baskerville.” Having exhausted all efforts to sell the type in England, Sarah Baskerville, in 1779, sold it for £3700 to a French society, which was founded by Beaumarchais for the purpose of buying the type and printing a complete edition of Voltaire. As, however, nearly half of Voltaire’s works were prohibited in France at that time, and frequently editions were burned, and men who bought and read them were sent to prison, it was found necessary to establish the printing-press at Kehl, near Strassburg, in a deserted fort. Toward the end of 1780 proposals appeared and were secretly circulated through France, and two years later proposals in English were distributed openly in England. Finally, after repeated delays from various causes, the edition of 15,000 copies was printed in 1789. Of these only 2000 copies found subscribers, and the entire enterprise was a financial disaster.
Perhaps the greatest compliment paid to the memory of Baskerville was this edition of the works of Voltaire. The Kehl Press was finally broken up about 1810, although before that time some of the type was sent to Paris and sold. This is shown by the fact that certain books printed in Paris between 1790 and 1806 were printed with Baskerville’s type, and an advertisement of the sale of Baskerville type, printed with the types themselves in black and red, which is in the possession of the Merrymount Press, Boston, was issued early in the nineteenth century. This begins: “The store-room of the Foundry of Baskerville, which presents to printers a new resource in this art, contains the types hereafter mentioned,” and closes as follows: “We will send out a sample of proofs of said types, with their price, while we are completing a Specimen or Book of Proofs of all that the Foundry of Baskerville contains.”
Reed also calls attention to four works of Alfieri, all bearing the imprint, dalla Tipografia di Kehl, co’ caratteri di Baskerville, and dated severally 1786, 1795, 1800, and 1809. These trace the survival of the Baskerville types to a date twenty years later than that at which they are commonly supposed to have perished. “It is to be hoped,” says Reed, “that their discovery may in due time reward the patience of those whose ambition it is to recover for their native land these precious relics of the most brilliant of all the English letter-founders.”[39] It is impossible to say precisely what became of the Baskerville founts which had gone to France, but so late as 1891, a book appeared in France professedly printed en Caractère Baskerville du xviii siècle. This may be a contemporary French copy of Baskerville’s work. The last book printed in England with the Baskerville imprint and with his types was a reprint of Berners’s “Treatyse of Fysshinge wyth an Angle,” published by Pickering in 1827.
William Martin, who cut the types for the famous Shakespeare Press of Boydell and Nicol, acquired his first knowledge of the art of type-founding at the Baskerville, Birmingham, Foundry. He produced the founts of type from which the works of the Shakespeare Press were printed, and, regarded simply as type-specimens, the productions of the Shakespeare Press justify his reputation as a worthy disciple of his great master, Baskerville. His Roman and Italic types were cut in decided imitation of the famous Birmingham models; although Hansard points out with disapproval that in certain particulars he attempted unwisely to vary the design. “As to the type,” he says, “the modern artist, Mr. Martin, has made an effort to cut the ceriphs and hair strokes excessively sharp and fine; the long ſ is discarded, and some trifling changes are introduced; but the letter does not stand so true or well in line as Baskerville’s, and, as to the Italic, the Birmingham artist will be found to far excel.”[40]
When, on the 25th day of March, 1779, Charles Whittingham was apprenticed to learn “the art and mysteries of printing, bookbinding and stationery,” the “art and mysteries of printing” had very much fallen into decay in England. Only one man, John Baskerville, seemed to have had the ambition, the skill, or the courage to make the business anything better than a plain trade. Even he, with money at his command, after six years of experiment and ten years of production, abandoned his attempt to create an English taste for fine printing. He produced books that astonished people who were sufficiently interested to examine them, and delighted the smaller number who purchased them, but when one went into the manufacture of paper, type, and all the apparatus of printing, it was not enough that he should be called one of the best printers of the world, he needed profit. The fact was that English people did not concern themselves with Baskerville’s enterprise in printing because they knew little, and cared less, about fine printing. The young Whittingham, who was learning his trade at Coventry as an apprentice, undoubtedly heard of Baskerville’s strange hazard at Birmingham, which was only a few miles away. A tradition survives that he saw some of Baskerville’s admirable volumes and conceived an ambition to excel in the same direction. It is probable that Whittingham went from Coventry to Birmingham when he was free of his apprenticeship, and studied at the famous Baskerville Press, which was then in existence. However that may be, he went to London and set up a press in a garret in Dean Street, Fetter Lane, hence the Chiswick Press and the productions of Pickering.
Baskerville considered the title-page to be a part of the book which required the most painstaking care, and he certainly produced a series of title-pages that have never been excelled. It had been the custom to crowd as much information about the book as possible upon the title-page. On the other hand, Baskerville endeavored to make his title-pages as concise as possible, and wherever a long title was necessary, as it was in the Prayer Books, he so chose the type and spaced the lines that there was no fault to be found. The title-page to his Bible is probably the most beautiful of them all, although the title-page to the New Testament is even more simple than the title-page to the book itself. It is a beautiful page and fine printing, without a superfluous line or an irritating decoration. It is a relief to turn from the crowded and rubricated red-line title-pages of the period to the restful simplicity of the title-pages of Baskerville.
And yet the master of the art of printing in the twentieth century wrote of Baskerville’s title-pages as follows: “There was then and there is now a rule obeyed by many printers that the main display line of a title must always be a full line. If the letters are too few the type must be widely spaced and one or more of these lines must fill the measure. No printer observed this rule more rigidly than Baskerville. Not only in his edition of Catullus, but in his quarto editions of Virgil, Juvenal, and Persius, the letters of the titles are spread over the page as if they had been dislocated by explosion. Even in the title-page of his Book of Common Prayer, for which he laid out more lines of display than could be gracefully put upon the page with a needed relief of white space, the letters in some lines are wedged widely apart in a useless attempt to give the lines the desired prominence. It is a handbill, not a title.”[41] He should have reproduced the title-page of the New Testament as an answer to this harsh criticism.