Baskerville after Baskerville

Baskerville acquired a wide reputation
with his edition of Virgil,
which included among its subscribers
not only a typefounder in
the Netherlands but also a former
printer and rising politician in
Massachusetts, Benjamin Frankin.
His types were mentioned with
approval by Fournier le jeune and
Giambattista Bodoni. They were
imitated in Britain, but bought after
his death and used and copied
in France. After long neglect, the
original matrices were rediscovered,
and the types not only came
back into use, but became the
models for new ‘Baskerville’ types
in the twentieth century. More
recently attempts have been made
to make faithful recreations of the
originals as digital fonts, and also
to design creative variations of
them. This talk will offer a survey
of the ‘brand’ that has continued
to bear the name of Baskerville.