BASKERVILLE

Brief history of the eponymous typeface designed by an 18th-century printer.

Garfield, author of more than 20 nonfiction books, recounts the origins of this common typeface, its use, and the life of the man who invented it, John Baskerville. This book is a companion to two others—on the Albertus and Comic Sans typefaces—and follows Garfield’s Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. (Although font and typeface are often considered synonyms, a font is actually the weight of the typeface.) Launched in 1757, Baskerville is admired for its openness, clarity, and ability to produce an uncluttered and highly readable text. These qualities echo Baskerville the man’s early career as a teacher of cursive handwriting and as an importer who was adept at lacquering furniture, a highly skilled craft known as japanning that emblemized his perfectionist nature. His Baskerville alphabet and numbers, composed in 14 sizes in both roman and italic, took seven years to perfect. Using the typeface, Baskerville printed high-quality books, among them Virgil’s poetry, Charles Bowlker’s The Art of Angling, and a “magnificent Bible [that] failed to sell.” After Baskerville’s death, he and the typeface moved about; his body was buried, unearthed, lost, and then found and reburied, while the original steel punches were sold to a printer in Paris, moved to Germany, sold a few more times, and finally deposited in the Cambridge University library. Slow to be adopted, the typeface became “truly accepted” when reissued in the 1920s. Garfield is curious about the world and anxious to share his interests, making for a pleasant and informative read. No connection to the man or the typeface goes unmentioned, including an amateurish experiment in 2012 to determine if one typeface might appear more truthful than another. Baskerville beat five other candidates.

A well-documented and entertaining glimpse into one small episode in typographic history.