FOR SCHOLARS OF PRINTING HISTORY John Baskerville's status as a giant of typography, book design and production is assured. By the late twentieth century, however, whilst he remained a genius for his biographers, he was almost totally ignored by economic, social and cultural historians. Baskerville has been typecast as a man of print, but he has a wider signif-icance within the Enlightenment, industrialisation and consumer culture, which merits further investigation. This exploration of Baskerville's reputation since his death uncovers a series of divergent approaches taken by British and American writers at different times and in different disciplines. It considers how perspectives have changed by charting the shifting topography of Baskerville studies since the eighteenth century. The focus is both chrono-logical and thematic. It studies the largely, but not entirely, celebratory work of Baskerville's immediate biographers, the emergence of a scholarly but eulogistic approach to his work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, in contrast, how economic, social and cultural historians have approached or failed to approach the man. Finally, the chapter looks at how Baskerville studies might journey forward, to uncover underlying layers and structures, the stratigraphy, which can lead to new research in the future. In so doing, it not only maps how Baskerville has been interpreted, but also charts the ways in which historical reputations can be shaped, ignored or remade.

BASKERVILLE'S EIGHTEENTH- AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY REPUTATIONS

THE CREATION of Baskerville's reputation as a printer was communicated both during and after his lifetime. In 1751, a poem, ‘Industry and genius’, published in Aris's Birmingham Gazette,celebrated Baskerville's inventiveness:

Between 1760 and 1767, the masthead of Aris's Birmingham Gazettewas set in Baskerville, a feature which recognised the printer's importance for local communications in Birmingham and, perhaps, how Baskerville through his type provided a public face for the town. An obituary in the same newspaper in 1775 established the leitmotif of Baskerville's posthumous reputation, namely the excellence of his print: ‘Died. On Monday last, at Easy Hill in this Town, Mr John Baskerville; whose memory will be perpetuated, by the Beauty and Elegance of his Printing, which he carried to a very great Perfection’.