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7 - A Reappraisal of Baskerville's Greek Types

Gerry Leonidas
Affiliation:
University of Reading.
Caroline Archer-Parré
Affiliation:
Birmingham City University
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Summary

JOHN BASKERVILLE'S POSITION in typographic history is assured by his contributions to the technology of printing and the style of his original typefaces, which defined the Transitional category in established classifica-tions. In 1763, Baskerville also cut a Greek typeface for the University Press in Oxford, for which he is rather less well known. At that time, the printing of Greek texts continued to be central to scholarship and discourse. The typography of Greek texts could be characterised as a continuation of French models from the sixteenth century, with a gradual dilution of the complexity of ligatures and abbreviations, mostly through printers in the Low Countries. In Britain, Greek printing was dominated by the university presses, which reproduced conservatively the continental models—exemplified by Oxford's Fell types, which were Dutch adaptations of earlier French models. Hindsight allows us to identify a meaningful development in the Greek types cut by Alexander Wilson (1766–1813) for the Foulis Press in Glasgow in the middle of the eighteenth century, but we can argue that at the time that Baskerville was considering Greek printing the typographic environment was ripe for a new style of Greek types. Baskerville's Greek typeface was used for two editions of the New Testament printed in 1763: a quarto in 500 copies and an octavo in 2,000 copies—and never again thereafter. The typeface maintained the cursive ductus of earlier models, but abandoned complex ligatures and any hint of scribal flourish. He homogenised the modulation of the letter strokes and the treatment of terminals, and normalised the horizontal alignments of all letters. Although the strokes are in some letters too delicate, the narrow set of the style composes a consistent, uniform texture that is a clean break from contemporaneous models. It is arguable that this is the first Greek typeface that can be described as fully typographic in the context of the technology of the time. It sets a pattern that was to be followed nearly a century and a half later, without acknowledgement, when the classicist Richard Porson's hand was used as a model for a new Greek typeface for Cambridge University Press.

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John Baskerville
Art and Industry of the Enlightenment
, pp. 133 - 150
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2017

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