John Baskerville

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Portrait of John Baskerville
Title page printed by John Baskerville
Today's Baskerville font

John Baskerville (born January 28, 1706 in Wolverley , † January 8, 1775 in Birmingham ) was an English typographer , master scribe , printer and member of the Royal Society of Arts .

Life

John Baskerville lived as a scribe and stone cutter in Birmingham from 1726 . A lacquer company specializing in Japanese lacquer, which he ran from 1738, made him economically independent and enabled him to deal with letterpress and type foundry . Since he did not like the usual typefaces, which had hardly changed in England since William Caslon , he began to cut his own typefaces around 1750 . In 1754 script samples were published by him for the first time; from 1757 until his death he worked as a stamp cutter and printer in London .

One of his first major publications was an edition of Virgil's works (1757). Baskerville's new writings soon met with public acclaim, and in 1758 he was appointed director of Cambridge University Press , which was an extraordinary honor. Some of his next major works were further editions of Latin classics; The double editions of Juvenal and Persius (1761) and the two Horace editions (1762, again 1770) became famous . While among Baskerville's contemporaries it was these classic editions that caused a sensation across Europe and were an important stimulus for the finishers of the classicist antiqua Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni , today Baskerville's English-language prints are even better known, especially the Book of Common Prayer (1760/62) and the New Testament (1763).

Financial difficulties caused Baskerville to negotiate the sale of its foundry and printing house between 1762 and 1767. In 1771 he was commissioned by the Molini brothers to print an edition of Ariost's Orlando furioso , which appeared in 1773. The fonts he designed were often imitated during his lifetime and continue to live under the name Baskerville to this day . After his death, a Parisian literary society headed by Beaumarchais bought Baskerville's entire typeface estate from the widow for the staggering price of £ 3,700 or (according to other sources) 92,000 francs. Beaumarchais had a splendid edition of Voltaire's works printed in Kehl .

Baskerville was an atheist and was buried in “unconsecrated earth” on his property at his own request. After the death of his wife Sarah, the property changed hands several times. When a canal was built on this property in 1821, Baskerville's coffin was uncovered and opened. Several priests refused to be buried; his mummified body was on display in Birmingham's two major department stores. A few years later he was buried in the crypt of Christ Church in Birmingham; In 1899 he was buried in Warstone Lane Cemetery.

literature

  • Alexander Waldow: Illustrated Encyclopedia [ sic ] of the graphic arts and related branches . Leipzig 1884; Reprint Munich a. a. 1993, ISBN 3-598-07250-3 , p. 80
  • Ralph Straus, Robert K. Dent: John Baskerville . Cambridge 1907
  • Josiah Henry Benton, John Findlay McRae: John Baskerville: Type Founder and Printer, 1706-1775 . London 2003, ISBN 1-84371-366-7
  • Philip Gaskell: John Baskerville: A Bibliography . Cambridge 1959, ISBN 978-0-521-17072-7
  • Baskerville, John . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 3 : Austria - Bisectrix . London 1910, p. 481 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Commons : John Baskerville  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Little Encyclopedia . Encyclios-Verlag, Zurich 1950, Volume 1, p. 136
  2. ↑ see also English Wikipedia
  3. ↑ birminghamconservationtrust.org
personal data
SURNAME Baskerville, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English typographer, master scribe, printer
DATE OF BIRTH January 28, 1706
PLACE OF BIRTH Wolverley (England)
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1775
Place of death Birmingham