Font of Wisdom, Font of Truth
I became a Baskerville convert in 2012, the year film-maker Errol Morris ran an uncontrolled experiment in The New York Times. By his arrangement, an article about the risk of asteroids colliding with Earth surreptitiously appeared online in six distinct versions. They featured the same reassuring quote from British physicist David Deutsch, but in different fonts:
At the end of the article, readers were asked if Deutsch was right to say that “we live in an era of unprecedented safety.” Did the font affect agreement? The results were analyzed by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell:
Baskerville is different from the rest. I’d call it a 1.5% advantage [in conviction] relative to the average of the other fonts. That advantage may seem small, but if that was a bump in sales figures, many online companies would kill for it.
The science of the project could be questioned. Maybe the active variable was how much the typeface of the quote contrasted with the typeface of the rest of the article, set in Cheltenham? Maybe, as the typeface designer Erik Spiekermann complained to Simon Garfield, any classic typeface would have done as well: Caslon, Garamond, Bembo, Times, or Palatino?
But I enjoyed the prospect of composing in the font of truth—and the self-directed symbolism of adopting a new typeface as I tried to write for a new audience, in the early drafts of what would come to be Midlife. Comic Sans was never on the menu; but Georgia was my font default, and the fact that Baskerville did better than Georgia is some evidence that Spiekermann was wrong.
The Spiekermann complaint appears in Baskerville: The Biography of a Typeface, Garfield’s scattered but entertaining narrative of the font’s rise, fall, and resurrection.1 The book is not a biography of John Baskerville—its protagonist is the font, not its inventor—but he is a major figure in it.
Born in Wolverley, near Kidderminster, January 28, 1707, Baskerville in his youth “displayed a talent for handwriting.” For once, this wasn’t damning with faint praise. He earned a living “as a handwriting instructor at a small school in Birmingham” and by 1730 added a sideline as a stonemason, “specialising in gravestones.” Neither profession was lucrative. Instead, he made his fortune in “japanning”—a knock-off method for lacquering fine wood products. But Baskerville’s passion was type:
‘Amongst the several mechanic Arts that have engaged my attention,’ he wrote in the preface to his edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost [in 1758], ‘there is no one I have pursued with so much steadiness and pleasure, as that of Letter-Founding. Having been an early admirer of the beauty of Letters, I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them,’ Accordingly, he had ‘endeavoured to produce a Sett of Types according to what I conceived to be their true proportion.’
It was a work of love. Baskerville spent ten years and £1000 honing his craft—the equivalent of about $350,000 dollars today—before publishing his first book, an edition of Virgil’s poetry, in 1757. Though beautiful, it was far from perfect. The volume is notorious for Baskerville’s obsessive edits.
Eleven copies found their way to Yale, where scholars have delighted in comparisons of the printings, not least the anomalies and cancellations (corrections). In 1937, for example, Professor Allen Hazen studied ten copies for the Yale University Library Gazette, confirming ‘a nervous fastidiousness’ in the printer: ‘If ever there was a book that was made fascinating by its misprints, this is it!’
Baskerville’s British reception was mixed, although the font was admired by Voltaire, and others, abroad. Alas, its Greek was an object of universal scorn:
[The letters are] ‘not good ones’ (William Bowyer), ‘like no Greek characters I have ever seen’ (Thomas Dibdin), ‘stiff and cramped’ (Johnson Ball), and plainly ‘execrable’ (Edward Rowe Mores).
With John’s death in 1775, the type was sold by his widow to a French printer. By the early 19th century, it had lapsed into obscurity, to be revived a century later by Bruce Rogers, advisor to the Monotype Corporation. Its greatest champion was Beatrice Warde, editor of the Monotype Recorder:
[In] regaining Baskerville we have found what may prove to be the perfect vehicle for the English language… there is perhaps no type in existence which welds together words into words so inevitably.
The rest, as they say, is history. Another century on, Errol Morris would declare Baskerville the font of (apparent) wisdom, and I’d adopt it for my typescripts, aiming to improve my self-belief by 1.5%.
I do think Baskerville is distinctively elegant, with its generous curves and varying line. That it was inspired by John’s calligraphy is no myth. “Baskerville’s letters were products of the way he taught writing and the angle of his pen,” Garfield argues, “and it was this that rendered them new.”
Caslon and its Old Face predecessors were popular at a time when it was traditional to hold a pen less vertically than the angle favoured by Baskerville, the new style enabling finer, more sparkling hair-strokes and a greater contrast between thick lines and thin.
Of particular beauty is the lower-case g. With its jaunty serif and open lower bowl, it seems about to spring to life—like a Pixar animation.
The artist David Patten called this g “the most exquisite thing ever to have been made in Birmingham.” His monument to Baskerville commemorates the glyph on one of six stone sculptures, spelling “Virgil” out in mirror image.
Typography is a self-effacing art. The printer, servant to the author, does not seek to draw attention to his work, but for it to be invisible. So argued Beatrice Warde, for whom a lucid typeface was a goblet made of crystal glass. No better tribute, then, to Baskerville, than punches that would print another’s name.
BONUS CONTENT: Readers who made it this far may also be interested in the footnote, the index, and front matter.
Strictly speaking, Baskerville is a typeface, not a font: fonts are species of the genus—e.g., Baskerville Italic 12-point. But I won’t bother to mark the difference.
"Few readers, I suspect, would suspect the degree to which typographic facts of life shape (quite literally) the content of what I say. Indeed, if — perish the thought! — I had been writing this book in any typeface other than Baskerville, the result would have been not this book, but only a distant cousin: just about every sentence would have come out differently. (I reckon that roughly half my writing time is spent adjusting text to look better on the page.) Thus the book you are reading is every bit as married to Baskerville's graceful face as it is to Salinger’s tongue."
— Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton Beau de Marot, p. 573
I adopted Baskerville in the 90s because it looked so elegant in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. Maybe Julia Annas, OSAP’s editor, intuited that Baskerville was the font of truth? And maybe Morris (a sometime philosopher) was a fan of OSAP too?