A love letter to Baskerville
There are typefaces I admire because they are useful. Baskerville I love because it was accused of hurting people's eyes.
That is not a joke. When John Baskerville's first books came out of his Birmingham press in the 1750s, English critics said the contrast was too sharp, the finish too glossy, the letters too refined. They said reading his pages gave them headaches. A typeface so carefully made that its own country treated it as a medical complaint is worth spending time with.
The man who made it
John Baskerville was born in 1706 in Wolverley, Worcestershire. He started as a writing master, then earned his living carving gravestones. The gravestone period matters: he spent years drawing letterforms at scale, cutting them into unforgiving material, watching how serifs and curves behaved under a chisel. By the time he came to type, he had already lived inside letters for a long time.
What funded the typeface was japanning. In his twenties and thirties Baskerville made a fortune producing lacquered metalware, decorative trays and boxes finished with the high-gloss technique imported from East Asia. By the late 1740s he was rich enough to devote himself to an expensive, slow, commercially questionable obsession. He built a printing house at his estate, Easy Hill, on the edge of Birmingham, and set about remaking every part of the book.
He was not only designing a typeface. He was designing ink to go with it, paper to receive the ink, a press that could hold a truer impression, and a post-press technique for pressing sheets between hot copper plates to smooth them. The punches were cut by John Handy, his punchcutter, working from Baskerville's drawings.
His first book, an edition of Virgil, took seven years and appeared in 1757. Cambridge then gave him the right to print the Bible, and in 1763 he produced a folio still considered one of the most beautiful English books ever made.
Why the English hated it and the French did not
The English printing trade in Baskerville's time was dominated by Caslon, a robust old-style typeface with modest contrast and the comfortable irregularity of letters designed for rough paper and variable ink. Baskerville's types looked nothing like Caslon. The strokes had far more contrast between thick and thin. The serifs were finer, more precisely bracketed. The stress was vertical where Caslon's was diagonal. On smooth, hot-pressed paper, printed with blacker ink, the result was a page that looked machined. To readers used to a warmer, looser aesthetic, the sharpness felt clinical.
Benjamin Franklin, who was close to Baskerville, wrote a very funny letter about this. He had heard English gentlemen complain that Baskerville's types would put their readers' eyes out, so he showed one of them a specimen page, claimed it was a Caslon, and watched the man praise it enthusiastically. The complaints were fashion, not optics.
France had no such problem. Baskerville's work was admired immediately in Paris, where a taste for refinement and neoclassical restraint was already forming. His types fed directly into the modern serifs of Didot and Bodoni a generation later. Baskerville is the hinge between old-style and modern, and you cannot understand Bodoni without understanding what Baskerville tried first.
The capital Q
If there is one letter that tells you this is Baskerville, it is the capital Q.
The tail swings out from the bottom of the bowl in a long, swash-like stroke that reaches to the right, curving and tapering as it goes. It does not tuck underneath. It does not end politely. It keeps going, often extending beneath the letter that follows, like a signature the punchcutter could not resist adding. It is a flourish that belongs to drawing rather than printing, and it survived into metal because Baskerville decided it would.
Every serious revival keeps that Q. If you want to test whether a typeface is really a Baskerville or a digitisation wearing the name, look at the Q first.
The italic
Baskerville's italic is more sloped than any Caslon, and more elegant. The lowercase letters have refined terminals and a forward lean that feels closer to handwriting than to print. The e is delicate, with a small, high crossbar. The capitals carry swash alternates for J, K, N, Q, T, Y, restrained compared to Granjon's Garamond italics but carrying the same impulse: the pen enjoying itself inside the discipline of metal.
Set a paragraph of Baskerville italic next to the roman and you can see what Baskerville was really doing. The roman is the finished product. The italic is where the drawing shows.
The S
The S in Baskerville is one of the quiet pleasures of the typeface. The vertical stress of transitional serifs puts the thickness at the top and bottom of the curve rather than diagonally. The terminals taper to fine, almost sharp points. The curve is tighter at the middle than in older romans, and the whole letter feels more drawn, less breathed.
I pay attention to the S because my name starts with one. Baskerville's is not the warmest in type history, but it is one of the most composed. It sits on the page like it has thought about every letter around it and decided exactly how much space to occupy.
The afterlife
Baskerville died in 1775. A religious freethinker, he wanted nothing to do with the church and was buried, at his own instruction, upright in unconsecrated ground inside a brick tomb in his garden. His body was moved several times over the following century as Birmingham expanded. One of the stranger afterlives in English printing history.
His second wife, Sarah Eaves, ran the foundry after his death and eventually sold the punches and matrices to Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, who used them to print his Kehl edition of Voltaire's complete works. The material scattered, was lost, and in 1953 was rediscovered at the Cambridge University Press. The punches still exist.
Sarah's role is why Zuzana Licko named her 1996 revival Mrs Eaves, which I will not labour here because Mrs Eaves has its own letter. The typeface survived because the woman who ran the business made sure it did.
Revivals worth knowing
Monotype Baskerville, released in 1923 by the Lanston Monotype Company, is the most widely distributed version and the one bundled with most software. A reasonable general-purpose digitisation, slightly tighter than the original.
Fry's Baskerville is an older English interpretation, originally cut by Isaac Moore for the Fry foundry in the late eighteenth century. A touch more condensed, slightly more dramatic in contrast.
ITC New Baskerville, designed in 1978, is the one most editorial designers reach for when they want more presence at text sizes. It holds up well on coated paper and at small scales.
Mrs Eaves, Zuzana Licko's 1996 interpretation, tries to capture what Baskerville looked like on the inked page rather than what the punch looked like on its own. A sibling, not a substitute.
The credibility thing
In 2012 the filmmaker Errol Morris ran a large informal experiment through the New York Times. He presented the same passage in several different typefaces and asked readers whether they agreed with its claims. Baskerville consistently produced higher rates of agreement than Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Trebuchet, or Comic Sans. The effect was small but real, and has been referenced since as "the Baskerville effect".
I am not sure the effect is really about Baskerville specifically. I think it is about what Baskerville signifies: careful, classical, unrushed, the house style of scholarly publishing and old institutions. The credibility is borrowed from nearly three centuries of the typeface being used by people trying to be taken seriously. Cambridge University Press has been setting books in it for most of that time. The Canadian government's wordmark uses a Baskerville derivative. You think of a serious book when you see a Baskerville page because that is mostly what you have seen it in.
A typeface that can lend its history to a piece of writing is doing real work.
Why I keep coming back
I reach for Baskerville when the writing needs to feel considered. It is not a neutral choice. It brings a period and a tradition with it, which can be exactly right or exactly wrong depending on what is being set. Wrong for anything that wants to feel casual. Right for long-form essays, for books, for any piece of text that asks the reader to slow down and trust it.
What I love most about Baskerville is the thing that got it rejected in its own lifetime. It is a typeface with the courage to be precise in a culture that prefers things to look handmade. John Baskerville spent twenty years making his letters exactly as he wanted them, was told they were too perfect, and kept going. The typeface outlasted the criticism by nearly three hundred years. Precision, done with care, does not get tired.