The Hammock Papers: Baskerville.

18 April 2021

Baskerville.

John Robinson traces the development of transitional serif letterforms and the impact of the Baskerville typefaces ...

By the early 1500s Paris had supplanted Venice as the epicenter of typographic arts, and the more precisely cut letterforms of Francesco Griffo were gaining in popularity on traditional old-style letterforms: Those influenced by the quill and cut in the spirit of the first roman typefaces developed in the 1470s by Nicolas Jenson’s workshop.

Further style modifications took place in the 1600s under Claude Garamond and his contemporaries, well into the heyday of Englishman William Caslon (mid-1700s) when the old-style letterform reached its final development. But the first conscious revision of type took place at the end of the seventeenth century when Philippe Grandjean cut the Romain du Roi typeface — a conception of letterforms that perfectly reflected the new attitude of the Age of Enlightenment.

While previous roman typefaces developed naturally over time, with each subsequent punch cutter modifying and improving upon letterforms designed by those before him, the Romain du Roi (the King’s Roman) was the first based on a rational, mathematical design. Mapping the letters out on grids converted traditionally round letterforms to a perpendicular axis; while serifs became sharper, less rounded, and exhibited less bracketing (the “filled in” area that connects serifs with strokes).

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Dr. Caroline Archer-Parré presents John Baskerville: The lasting legacy of Birmingham's famous printer ...

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL