For some reason, probably because he did better work than other printers, and produced books without so much regard to profit as they were obliged to consider, Baskerville’s work was very much criticised by other printers in his time. Dr. Bedford said: “By Baskerville’s specimen of his types you will perceive how much the elegance of them is owing to the paper, which he makes himself as well as the types and the ink also; I was informed that whenever they come to be used by common pressmen and common materials they lose their beauty considerably.” It is now certain that he did not make his paper. Certainly he made it for no books except Virgil and the Milton. Rowe Mores,[10] in “English Typographical Founders and Founderies,” 1778 (page 86), said: “Mr. Baskerville of Birmingham, that enterprizing place, made some attempts at letter-cutting, but desisted and with good reason. The Greek cut by him, or his, for the University of Oxford is execrable. Indeed, he can hardly claim a place amongst letter-cutters. His typographical excellence lay more in his trim, glossy paper to dim the sight.” In a note upon this passage John Nichols said: “The idea entertained by Mr. Mores of the ingenious Mr. Baskerville is certainly a just one. His glossy paper and too sharp type offend the patience of a reader more sensibly than the innovations I have already censured.”
Nichols was a rival printer. He was apprenticed to William Bowyer, of whom he was an executor and the residuary legatee. All his prejudices were against Baskerville and his work. He wrote many books, but they were mostly by hirelings, the blunders only being his own. He reached the summit of his ambition when he became Master of the Stationers’ Company in 1804.
The following letter from Franklin explains the prejudice and ignorance with respect to Baskerville’s work: “Let me give you a pleasant instance of the prejudice some have entertained against your work. Soon after I returned, discoursing with a gentleman concerning the artists of Birmingham, he said you would be the means of blinding all the readers of the nation, for the strokes of your letters being too thin and narrow, hurt the eye, and he could never read a line of them without pain. ‘I thought,’ said I, ‘you were going to complain of the gloss on the paper some object to.’ ‘No, no,’ said he, ‘I have heard that mentioned, but it is not that; it is in the form and cut of the letters themselves, they have not that height and thickness of the stroke which makes the common printing so much more comfortable to the eye.’ You see this gentleman was a connoisseur. In vain I endeavoured to support your character against the charge; he knew what he felt, and could see the reason of it, and several other gentlemen among his friends had made the same observation, etc. Yesterday he called to visit me, when, mischievously bent to try his judgement, I stepped into my closet, tore off the top of Mr. Caslon’s Specimen, and produced it to him as yours, brought with me from Birmingham saying, I had been examining it, since he spoke to me, and could not for my life perceive the disproportion he mentioned, desiring him to point it out to me. He readily undertook it, and went over the several founts, showing me everywhere what he thought instances of that disproportion; and declared that he could not then read the specimen without feeling very strongly the pain he had mentioned to me. I spared him that time the confusion of being told, that these were the types he had been reading all his life, with so much ease to his eyes; the types his adored Newton is printed with, on which he has pored not a little; nay the very types his own book is printed with (for he himself is an author), and yet never discovered the painful disproportion in them, till he thought they were yours.”
Burton says: “A collector, with a taste for the inaccurate, might easily satiate it in the editions, so attractive in their deceptive beauty, of the great Birmingham printer, Baskerville.”[11] Reed says: “Despite the splendid appearance of his impressions, the ordinary English printers viewed with something like suspicion the meretricious combination of sharp type and hot-pressed paper which lent to his sheets their extraordinary brilliancy. They objected to the dazzling effect thus produced on the eye; they found fault with the unevenness of tone and colour in different parts of the same book, and even discovered an irregularity and lack of symmetry in some of his types, which his glossy paper and bright ink alike failed to disguise.”[12]
Both these statements are obviously untrue. An examination of Baskerville’s books shows that they are accurate, or at least the inaccuracies are only those of the editions from which they are reprinted, and the combination of paper, ink, and type is necessary to make a really fine book.
“In private life,” Reed remarks, “he was a bundle of paradoxes. He was an exemplary son, and an affectionate, judicious husband, but full of personal animosities.... In person he was a shrivelled old coxcomb, but in spirit he was a worker of unquenchable energy. Peevish in temper, he was a charming host.... The one thing that reconciled all was his strong personality. Whatever else he was he was never commonplace.”
“He was one of those men,” says a writer in the “Secular Review,” “who strove for excellence, and was not satisfied until he obtained it. Whatever he undertook to do he not only did well, but better than his predecessors, and he was in truth a genuine national reformer.” The editor of the “Beauties of Worcestershire” calls Baskerville “a most useful and estimable character,” and says he was of an “ancient family, as old as the Conquest.” This may be taken with some salt. Perhaps the best evidence of the sort of man he was is found in the impression that he made upon the most eminent men of his time, by the thoroughness and energy of his life, his originality of taste, his fine pride in perfect work, his stoutness of courage, and his honorable impartiality in printing works with which he coincided, and those which represented the religious views of his countrymen from which he himself dissented.[13]
Dr. Carlyle thus speaks of a visit to him: “We passed the day in seeing the Baskerville press, and Baskerville himself, who was a great curiosity.... Baskerville was on hand with his folio Bible at this time, and Garbett insisted on being allowed to subscribe for Home and Robertson. Home’s absence afflicted him, for he had seen and heard of the tragedy of Douglas. Robertson hitherto had no name, and the printer said bluntly that he would rather have one subscription to his work of a man like Mr. Home, than an hundred ordinary men. He dined with us that day, and acquitted himself so well that Robertson pronounced him a man of genius, while James Adam and I thought him but a prating pedant.”[14] Kippis adds “his own testimony concerning Mr. Baskerville’s politeness to strangers, and the cheerful hospitality with which he treated those who were introduced to him. He was well known to many ingenious men.”
Baskerville belonged to the literary club in Birmingham, called the “Luna Club,” which used to meet on the nights of the full moon, so that the members might have a light to go home by. Hence the name of the members—“the Lunaticks.” It had among its members many most famous men. Wedgwood, the potter; Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the poet; Thomas Day, author of “Sanford and Merton;” Sir William Herschel, the astronomer; Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist; Samuel Galton; Dr. Withering, the botanist and physician to the General Hospital at Birmingham; and others of like character were all members of it.
Baskerville had his own taste about the printing and decoration of his books. When Dodsley sent a plate to him to be included in a volume he was printing, Baskerville told him that his own taste would not permit him to use the plate. He said: “If you will accept my judgment and skill, it is at your service.”[15] In fact, Baskerville always had his own way, and did things as he wished to do them, and whatever credit there is for his productions is due to him alone. Tedder says that “his social virtues were considerable—a good son, an affectionate father and kinsman, polite and hospitable to strangers—he was entirely without the jealousy commonly ascribed to the artist and inventor. Birmingham has contributed many distinguished men to the industrial armies of England; but there are few of whom she has more reason to be proud than the skilful genius who was at once the British Aldus Manutius and the finest printer of modern times.”[16]