Foreword

Summary

JOHN BASKERVILLE was a man of many talents: japanner, calligrapher, letter-carver, typographer, printer and maker of beautiful books. All these aspects of his extraordinary career—and his colourful personality—are represented in this fine collection of essays. Yet while the books he printed are now seen as masterpieces, little research was undertaken on his techniques, milieu and legacy until the foundation of the Baskerville Society in 2011 and the conference that followed two years later. This brought together scholars from different disciplines, printers, curators and collectors under the wing of Birmingham City University and the University of Birmingham's Centre for Printing History and Culture. At a time when we lament cuts to funding in the humanities, we must celebrate the energy of the Centre for Printing History, which has rapidly become a hub for dynamic original research.

Birmingham was Baskerville's home, from his youth onwards, when he came to the town to make his way as a writing master in the late 1720s. Slight in build, flashy in dress, intense in spirit, eager and curious and quarrelsome at times, the young Baskerville was a canny businessman, sharing in Birmingham's fortunes as it grew from a small metal-working town into an industrial power-house, exporting to Europe, Russia, America and the colonies. He made his name as a manufacturer of japanware, imitating oriental lacquer work—a booming luxury trade. With nothing to hold him back, he launched into experimenting with supreme confidence—a quality shared with the entrepreneurs, professional men and industrialists of the town's Lunar Society, among them Dr William Small, James Watt and Matthew Boulton (to whom Baskerville, like many, lent money).

The profits from his japanning let him launch in 1750 into his passion for type founding and printing. He was part of a network of West Midland designers, paper-makers and binders, but he also belonged to a wider world, the cultural map of the Enlightenment. Like Josiah Wedgwood, another member of the Lunar Society, he combined scientific enquiry and techno-logical invention with art: improving the printing press and ink, using Whatman's new wove paper and—controversially—glazing his pages, startling the world with his first book, Virgil's Bucolica, Georgica, et Aeneis. His fine book production brought him into contact with writers like William Shenstone, and helped him develop close professional and personal ties with the London publisher William Dodsley.