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 endeavored 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 judgment, 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 is himself an author), and yet never discovered the painful disproportion in them, till he thought they were yours.
Title Page of Baskerville’s Virgil, Birmingham, 1757 (8½ × 5⅜ inches)
Text Page of Baskerville’s Virgil, Birmingham, 1757 (8½ × 5⅜ inches)
The Virgil itself, beyond the interest that exists in its type, shows grace and dignity in its composition and margins. For the first time we have a type title (page [247]) that shows a printer’s appreciation of its possibilities. Baskerville affected extreme simplicity, employing no head or tail pieces and no ornamental initials to accomplish his effects (page [249]).
The copy of Baskerville’s Virgil in my library contains a copper-plate frontispiece. The advertisement which particularly emphasized this feature excited my curiosity, as no book of Baskerville’s is known to have contained illustrations. When I secured the copy I found that the frontispiece was a steel engraving stamped on water-marked paper which indicated its age to be at least two hundred years earlier than the publication of the book. The owner of this particular copy had inserted the illustration in re-binding, and it was no part of the original edition!
The glossy paper referred to in Franklin’s letter was an outcome of Baskerville’s earlier business experience. It occurred to him that type would print better upon highly finished paper, and that this finish could be secured by pressing the regular book paper of the time between heated japan plates made at his own establishment. Baskerville is entitled to the credit of having been the first printer to use highly finished paper, and, beyond this, as Dibdin says of him, “He united, in a singularly happy manner, the elegance of Plantin with the clearness of the Elzevirs.”