Bij de Liverpool University Press is een boek over John Baskerville verschenen. Hoog tijd, want een serieus boek over deze belangrijke achttiende-eeuwse drukker en typograaf (om maar een paar van zijn vele activiteiten te noemen) ontbrak tot nog toe. Helaas is deze uitgave wel aan de prijzige kant (£80).
Van de website van de uitgever:
This book is concerned with the eighteenth-century typographer, printer, industrialist and Enlightenment figure, John Baskerville (1707-75). Baskerville was a Birmingham inventor, entrepreneur and artist with a worldwide reputation who made eighteenth-century Birmingham a city without typographic equal, by changing the course of type design. Baskerville not only designed one of the world’s most historically important typefaces, he also experimented with casting and setting type, improved the construction of the printing-press, developed a new kind of paper and refined the quality of printing inks. His typographic experiments put him ahead of his time, had an international impact and did much to enhance the printing and publishing industries of his day. Yet despite his importance, fame and influence many aspects of Baskerville’s work and life remain unexplored and his contribution to the arts, industry, culture and society of the Enlightenment are largely unrecognized. Moreover, recent scholarly research in archaeology, art and design, history, literary studies and typography, is leading to a fundamental reassessment of many aspects of Baskerville’s life and impact, including his birthplace, his work as an industrialist, the networks which sustained him and the reception of his printing in Britain and overseas.
De inhoudsopgave:
Caroline Archer-Parré and Malcom Dick, John Baskerville: art and industry of the enlightenment.
Malcolm Dick, The topographies of a typographer: mapping John Baskerville since the Eighteenth century.
John Hinks, Baskerville’s Birmingham: printing and the English urban renaissance.
George Demidowicz, Baskerville’s birthplace and buildings.
Yvonne Jones, John Baskerville: japanner of ‘tea trays and other household goods.’
Susan Whyman, John Baskerville, William Hutton and their social networks.
Ewan Clayton, John Baskerville the writing master: calligraphy and type in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries.
Gerry Leonidas, A reappraisal of Baskerville’s Greek types.
Barry McKay & Diana Patterson, John Baskerville’s decorated papers.
Aurelie Martin, The ‘Baskerville bindings’.
Martin Killeen, After the ‘perfect book’: English printers and their use of Baskerville type, 1767-90.
Caroline Archer-Parré, The Cambridge cult of the Baskerville Press.