Text Pages (4 × 2 inches)
The Terence of 1635 is the volume I selected for my collection (page [242]). While not really beautiful, it is a charming little book. The copper-plate title (page [241]) serves not only its original purpose but is also an illustration. The Elzevirs were wise enough to go back a hundred years and revive the practice of the copper-plate title, which had been discarded by intermediate printers because of its expense. The types themselves, far superior to other fonts in use at that time by other printers, were especially designed for the Elzevirs by Christoffel van Dyck. The interspacing of the capitals and the small capitals, the arrangement of the margins, and the general layout all show taste and knowledge of typographical precedent. The presswork would appear to better advantage except for the impossibility of securing ink of consistent quality.
The Elzevirs showed a great advance in business organization over any of their predecessors. Freed from oppressive censorship, they were able to issue a long list of volumes which were disposed of through connections established in the principal book centers of Italy, France, Germany, and Scandinavia, as well as throughout the Netherlands themselves. There is no record of any Elzevir publication proving a failure; but, by the same token, one cannot say that the Elzevirs accomplished as much for the art to which they devoted themselves as did the master-printers in whose steps they followed.
Curiously enough, it was not until the eighteenth century that England produced volumes which were pre-eminent in any period. Caxton’s work, extraordinary as it was, competed against books made at the same time in Venice by Jenson, and were not equal to these Italian masterpieces. I have a leaf from a Caxton volume which I often place beside my Jenson volume, and the comparison always increases my wonder and admiration for the great Italian printer. Caxton’s work was epoch-making, but until John Baskerville issued his Virgil in Birmingham, in 1757, England had not produced a volume that stood out, at the moment of its publication, as the best of its time.
John Baskerville
(1706–1775)
John Baskerville is one of the most unique characters to be found in the annals of printing. He had been in turn a footman, a writing teacher, an engraver of slate gravestones, and the proprietor of a successful japanning establishment. He showed no special interest in types or books until middle age, and after he had amassed a fortune. Then, suddenly, he designed and cut types which competed successfully with the famous Caslon fonts, and produced his Virgil, which, as Benjamin Franklin wrote in presenting a copy to the Harvard College Library, was “thought to be the most curiously printed of any book hitherto done in the world.” Macaulay called it, “The first of those magnificent editions which went forth to astonish all the librarians of Europe.”
The Baskerville types were at first received with scant praise, although even the severest critics admitted that the Italic characters, from which was eliminated that cramped design seen in the Italics of other foundries of the period, were essentially beautiful. A letter written by Benjamin Franklin to Baskerville in 1760 is of amusing interest: