Introduction

Abstract

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....