This chapter considers an early impetus in the Baskerville revival: the Baskerville Club, whose work encouraged the ‘fashionable Cambridge cult of the Baskerville press.’ The Baskerville Club was established in 1903 by a small group of Cambridge librarians, bibliographers and bibliophiles brought together through a common concern for the printer’s books. The Baskerville Club was probably the earliest gathering of what can loosely be described as Baskerville scholars, or if not Baskerville scholars as such, at least academics who had been brought together through a mutual interest in the printer and his books, each with a common desire to raise awareness of his publications, and to contribute to an understanding of his work. The Club’s primary publication, the No 1 Handlist, provided an early indication of the level of complexity and confusion attached to describing Baskerville’s books: problems experienced, but not wholly solved, by the printer’s subsequent bibliographers. This chapter explores the degree to which the Club spearheaded the twentieth-century revival of interest in Baskerville; its role in laying the foundations upon which subsequent scholarly Baskerville activity has been built; and the extent to which it influenced the development and progress of bibliographical studies.

BASKERVILLE, with its well-considered ‘proportions and design, its methods of thickening or thinning parts of a letter, and its sharper and more horizontal treatment of serifs’,1 is one of the world’s most widely used, enduring and influential typefaces. It was created by John Baskerville (1707–75), a printer, entrepreneur and artist who changed the course of type design and made eighteenth-century Birmingham a town without typographic equal....

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With particular reference to Birmingham's printing industry, this article considers how machines and materials, crafts and skills, alongside working practices and specialist knowledge were transferred between the local printing industry and the many and various trades active in the region during the long eighteenth century. It demonstrates how the effect of place and space and the unique combination of skills and materials available in the town assisted in the technical progress of the printing industry and gave rise to specialist forms of printing, some of which are still active in the region today.