The Cambridge Cult of the Baskerville Press

Abstract

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.