The Man Who Sank £600 Before He Liked a Single Letter

The remarkable story of John Baskerville and the typeface that changed the world

Here’s a challenge for me. Make a blog on a typeface interesting.

Challenge accepted!

I love discovering those little-known facts about Birmingham, and this is one of them. The typeface used by newspapers worldwide was invented in eighteenth-century Birmingham. John Baskerville was a self-taught engraver and writing master, he was also a japanner (more on that later). Anyway, he spent years in obsessive pursuit of the perfect letterform and he sunk a small fortune into his endeavour before he was satisfied with a single character. Sounds obsessive, but these were the days before Netflix and video games, so you’ll have to cut him a bit of slack.

The typeface he eventually produced would grace the pages of some of the finest books ever printed, influence generations of typographers, and, almost three centuries later, remain one of the most beloved and widely used fonts in the world.

This is his story, slightly condensed down to the snippets I found interesting.

Another Birmingham Legacy From Humble Beginnings

John Baskerville was born in 1706 in the rural village of Wolverley, Worcestershire, the last of many children in a family of modest means. He arrived in Birmingham as a young man and established himself first as a writing master, then as a stone engraver. Those skills trained his eye for the precise geometry of letterforms.

He was a man of the Enlightenment: a member of Birmingham’s famous Lunar Society, that extraordinary gathering of industrialists, scientists, and thinkers that included figures such as James Watt and Erasmus Darwin. (The Lunar Society definitely requires a blog.)

Before type, there was japanning. Baskerville made his real fortune applying a fashionable Asian-inspired lacquering technique to metal and papier-mâché goods such as tea trays, snuff boxes, cabinets, and selling them to the successful middle classes. By the time he turned his attention to typography in his late forties, he had the wealth to fund an obsession that would have bankrupted a lesser man. As my heading says, he sunk £600 before he even produced one letter. That’s around £100,000 in today’s money, which is quite a hobby!

The Making of a Masterpiece

Baskerville’s typeface, completed around 1754–1757, was dramatically different from the dominant styles of the day. His letters had sharper, more tapered serifs, greater contrast between thick and thin lines, and a more vertical axis on rounded characters. The overall effect was one of elegance, precision, and was ‘luminously clear’. The font I'm using for this article is, of course, Libre Baskerville — so you can see what I mean.

This is where I go a little nerdy. Baskerville understood that a typeface is only as good as the conditions in which it is printed. He pioneered the use of wove paper which has a smoother surface than the laid paper of the time. He also developed his own intensely black ink. Baskerville then pressed his printed sheets between heated copper plates to give them an unprecedented gloss. The result was printing of razor-sharp clarity that astonished contemporaries. Dieter Hofrichter, a type designer from 1980 (over 200 years later), said that the printing was so razor sharp ‘it almost hurt your eyes to see them.’

Change — Always a Stumbling Block

Baskerville’s first major publication, a 1757 edition of Virgil’s works, was a sensation among connoisseurs, but the Brits didn't like his typeface. Critics complained that the extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes was painful to read and would ruin the nation’s eyesight. (Insert rolly-eye emoji). His books sold better on the Continent, as Europe was called, than at home. Even the French philosopher Voltaire was among his most ardent admirers.

Baskerville’s editions of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer are still regarded as masterworks of the typographic art. Yet the printing operation never quite paid its way. Baskerville died in 1775, having never achieved the commercial recognition he craved, though his reputation among the enlightened was beyond dispute.

Baskerville was a declared atheist and wished to be buried in his garden rather than on consecrated ground. (I rather like his style). His wish was initially granted, but his remains were disturbed several times over the following century as the land changed hands, before finally being interred in the catacombs of a Birmingham church, the same church as Matthew and Sarah Seller in A Legacy Forged. His original typographic punches, the metal templates for each letter, were sold by his widow, passed through several hands including the French dramatist Beaumarchais, and eventually presented to Cambridge University Press in 1953, where they remain to this day.

Rediscovery and Revival

For much of the nineteenth century, Baskerville’s typeface lay largely forgotten. It was the private press movement of the late 1800s that brought Baskerville back to prominence, but not quite far enough. Through the twentieth century, Baskerville style was recut by foundry after foundry. Each revival making its own 'improvements', taking liberties with proportions and weights to suit the technologies of its time: hot metal; phototypesetting, and eventually digital outlines. The typefaces of Garamond and Bodoni were born out of Baskerville and are now a staple of quality book typography on both sides of the Atlantic.

Authors, Beware the Font Trap

Here lies a trap for the unwary writer. The design of Baskerville, being over 270 years old, is firmly in the public domain. But — authors pay attention now — every modern digital implementation of that design is a fresh piece of software, and each carries its own licence. Not all of them permit commercial use, and that includes publishing a novel.

The situation is similar to Times New Roman, which many authors wrongly assume is free to use: the underlying design is old, but the font files distributed with Microsoft Windows are proprietary and licensed only for personal use within Microsoft products. The same caution applies to “Baskerville” as it ships with macOS; Apple’s version is for personal use only.

I put this handy ready reckoner together for you because I thought my website SEO might like it.

VERSION	SOURCE	COMMERCIAL USE?
Libre Baskerville	Google Fonts (free download)	✓ Free (SIL Open Font Licence)
Baskerville (macOS)	Bundled with Apple devices	✗ Personal use only
Baskerville PT	Adobe Fonts (subscription)	~ With active Adobe subscription
ITC New Baskerville	MyFonts, Fonts.com	✗ Purchase required
Baskerville	Google Fonts (free download)	✓ Free (SIL OFL)

For authors preparing a manuscript for print publication, Libre Baskerville is the safest and most straightforward choice. My books are unashamedly Brummie, so I’m looking to publish my second and all future books in Libre Baskerville. It is released under the SIL Open Font Licence, which explicitly states that the licence terms do not apply to documents created using the font. This means your printed novel is entirely unaffected. It is available for free from Google Fonts and sets beautifully at body text sizes. (I’ll save you the Google search — SIL stands for Summer Institute of Linguistics.)

A Note for Novelists: 

Always verify the licence of any font before submitting a manuscript for commercial publication, particularly if using fonts bundled with software or downloaded from general repositories. Your publisher or printer may have preferred fonts they have already licensed. It is worth asking. When in doubt, Libre Baskerville is your friend: it carries the spirit of one of history's great typographers and costs nothing.  

The Legacy: Still Razor-Sharp After 270 Years

What makes Baskerville endure when so many typefaces have faded? Partly it is the elegance of the letterforms themselves. The quality of refinement without coldness, clarity without sterility, my research tells me. For these reasons it is a good font to choose for dyslexics, something I like to consider when publishing my books. Baskerville carries the gravitas of serious literary publishing. It seems that Baskerville was right. His obsessive pursuit of legibility, his insistence on controlling every variable in the printing process, produced something that works beautifully, reliably, timelessly.

A Birmingham City University and Cambridge University research partnership launched in 2024, funded by a £1 million Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, is currently using microscopy, chemical analysis, and advanced 3D imaging to unlock the remaining secrets of Baskerville’s original punches. Nearly three centuries on, typographers are still learning from him.

The man who sank £600 before he liked a single letter would, one suspects, have been quietly pleased.

If you have reached this far, then you are clearly as nerdy as me, so I've listed the references I used for my searches, it was quite a rabbit-warren! Sorry about Wikipedia, I'm not keen on that source but it did give a good overview.

John Baskerville's story is exactly the kind of hidden history I love to uncover. If you enjoy remarkable stories about people and British industry, particularly in Birmingham, I'll be blogging about those who shaped our region and our country. Images and slides of these are shared on Pinterest too and you can join the conversation on Substack.

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References

Primary Historical Sources

Hutton, William. An History of Birmingham. 1783 original; various later reprints. Source of the quote: “spent many years in the uncertain pursuit, sunk 600 pounds before he could produce one letter to please himself.”

Straus, Ralph, and Robert K. Dent. John Baskerville: A Memoir. Cambridge University Press, 1907. A foundational biography drawing on local research materials.

Academic & Scholarly Works

Uglow, Jenny. The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.

Mosley, James. ‘Baskerville, John (1706–1775)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004. oxforddnb.com

Archer-Parré, Caroline, Ann-Marie Carey, and Keith Adcock. ‘The Baskerville Punches: Revelations of Craftsmanship’. Midland History, 45.2 (2020), pp. 176–189.

Online Reference Articles

Wikipedia: John Baskerville. A well-sourced overview covering his life, typeface design, burial, and the fate of his type punches. wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baskerville

Encyclopædia Britannica: John Baskerville britannica.com/biography/John-Baskerville

EBSCO Research Starters: John Baskerville ebsco.com/research-starters/history/john-baskerville

Cambridge Library Collection Blog: John Baskerville, Type-Founder and Printer. September 2014. cambridgelibrarycollection.wordpress.com

Britain Unlimited: John Baskerville biography britainunlimited.com/john-baskerville

The Iron Room (Library of Birmingham blog): John Baskerville: Modern Typeface Inventor. March 2022. theironroom.wordpress.com

The Baskerville Punches Research Project (2024–ongoing)

Birmingham City University: Small Performances project bcu.ac.uk/research/small-performances-baskerville

Cambridge University Library: Baskerville project page lib.cam.ac.uk/stories/baskerville

Grapevine Birmingham: Universities celebrate two years of groundbreaking Baskerville research. March 2026. grapevinebirmingham.com

The Persuasion Study

Morris, Errol. ‘Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist?’. New York Times Opinionator blog, 2012. The 45,000-reader experiment that found Baskerville uniquely persuasive.

Fast Company: Are Some Fonts More Believable Than Others? fastcompany.com/1670556/are-some-fonts-more-believable-than-others

Font Licensing

Google Fonts: Libre Baskerville. Free download page; SIL Open Font Licence. fonts.google.com/specimen/Libre+Baskerville

Font Squirrel: Libre Baskerville licence. Full SIL OFL text confirming documents created with the font are unaffected by the licence. fontsquirrel.com/fonts/libre-baskerville