The Quiet Authority of a Sharper Serif

John Baskerville did not soften the page for the reader; he made the page worthy of the type. A defence of the Transitional letter, cut in Birmingham in 1757, and the glazed sheet it was born to live on.

I spent the better part of last winter in Birmingham, walking between the surviving traces of a press that has been cold for two and a half centuries. Baskerville's workshop stood near Easy Row, and the man himself is buried, unconsecrated, somewhere under the asphalt of a car park. What remains is not the building but the argument: that a letterform could be sharper, its contrast steeper, its axis nearly upright, and that the page beneath it ought to be smooth enough to let the ink sit up rather than drink in.

The Invention of the Cool Sheet

The secret was not in the punch. It was in the paper. Baskerville persuaded the papermaker James Whatman to produce a wove sheet, then ran it hot between copper plates until it wore a faint grey sheen. The result reads as a cool glazed grey-tan, not the warm cream we now mistake for old books. Cream is the colour of decay; his page was the colour of intention.