In the early days, a printer’s type was his own. He made it and used it. He did not sell it. English-cast types did not become a marketable ware for more than a century after printing was introduced into England. As late as 1799, it was the statute law in England that no one should be allowed to possess or use a printing-press or types for printing without giving notice to a justice of the peace and obtaining a certificate, and any justice of the peace might issue a warrant to search any premises and seize any press or printing-types not thus certificated. This remained the law with regard to type-founding until 1869; but happily the law was not enforced, except for a few years after it was passed. Printers received patents and monopolies for printing certain books. The result was great degeneracy in the quality of printing. A privileged printer, sure of his monopoly, had no inducement to execute good work at more cost or pains than was necessary. Old type would do as well as new, and bad type as well as good. The typography of the whole Stuart period is a disgrace to English art.[42]
Printing in England in the early part of the eighteenth century was in a sorry state. Official broadsides, political pamphlets, works of literature, and even Bibles show a depression and degeneration so marked that one is tempted to believe the art of printing was rapidly becoming lost in a wilderness of what may be termed “Brown sheets and sorry letter.” No foundry was contributing anything towards the revival of good printing, with the exception of the Oxford University, and Oxford owed its founts to gifts procured mainly from abroad. Scarcely one good piece of printing was the impression of English type, and even the Scotch printers were rebuked for not stocking their cases with Dutch type. Tonson, the foremost English printer, is said on one occasion to have lodged in Amsterdam while a founder there was casting him £300 worth of type. James, the only English founder who showed any vitality, owed his success chiefly, if not entirely, to the fact that all his letters were the product of Dutch matrices, and even these, in his hands, were so indifferently cast as to be often as bad as English type. How far this decline was due to the printer or the founder, or how far both were the result of that system of Star Chamber decrees, monopolies, patents, restraints, and privileges which characterized the illiberal days of the Stuarts, it is impossible to say, but the fact is that English typography was in a very bad way.
William Caslon, a gunsmith’s apprentice, made the first attempt, about 1720, to found English type, and in 1730 his types were very much used. But the condition of printing was still anything but satisfactory; and although under the influence of Caslon’s genius the press was recovering from the reproach under which it lay at the beginning of the century, England was still very far behind her neighbors both in typographical enterprise and achievement. Fine printing was unknown. Once more it was left to an outsider to initiate a new departure; and in 1750 the art of printing found its deliverer in the person of an eccentric Birmingham japanner, Baskerville. To him is due the honor of the first real stride towards a higher level of national typography; an example which became the incentive to that outburst of enthusiasm—that “matrix and puncheon mania,” as Dibdin terms it—“which brought forth the series of splendid typographical productions with which the eighteenth century closed and the nineteenth century opened.”
The magnificent works which between 1759 and 1772 continued to issue from his press not only confirmed him in his reputation, but raised his name to a unique position among the modern improvers of the art. The paper, the type, and the general execution of his works were such as English readers had not been accustomed to, while the disinterested enthusiasm with which, regardless of profit, he pursued his ideal, fully merited the eulogy of the printer-poet who wrote:
“O Baskerville! the anxious wish was thine
Utility with beauty to combine;
To bid the o’erweening thirst of gain subside;
Improvement all thy care and all thy pride;
When Birmingham—for riots and for crimes
Shall meet the long reproach of future times,