28 TUGboat, Volume 38 (2017), No. 1 BaskervilleF To bring his ideas to fruition required making his own printing machinery, his own ultra-smooth, pressed pa- Michael Sharpe per and his own high quality ink. It is understandable Abstract that his business was not greatly successful as a com- mercial enterprise, and he stands as an exemplar of the BaskervilleF, where F may stand ambiguously for either aphorism about making a small fortune as a printer Free or Fry’s, is derived from Libre Baskerville, and and type founder.1 Following his rst production of an attempts to move away from its web font design toward edition of a work of Virgil, he was appointed (1758) as a font of more traditional Baskervillian appearance. printer to the Cambridge University Press and in the Its model is the Baskerville from the American Type course of the next fteen years published about fty Foundry (ATF) in the early twentieth century, which in classic volumes. His greatest publication is thought to turn was loosely based on Fry’s Baskerville, and had a be his folio Bible (1763), made according to his highest new italic designed afresh by Morris Fuller Benton. standards. 1 Baskerville’s life and work Baskerville seems to have been unusually progres- sive for his time, a free thinker though much of his John Baskerville (1706–1775) was born to a poor family work involved religious texts, and did not marry his in Birmingham but his talents became apparent early. housekeeper, and, nally, mistress and business part- He received basic schooling and worked for a period as ner, Sarah Eaves, until very late in life. (Zuzana Licko’s a writing master before turning to what made him quite font Mrs. Eaves is based on Baskerville but with softer wealthy, creating and operating a business that japanned features.) furniture. (Japanning involved multiple layers of heat At the time, the English printing community did treated, highly polished lacquer. The process was de- not give Baskerville much credit for his innovations. veloped as a European response to a similar Japanese His rivals spread stories about the sharpness of his ser- metal lacquering process which had become very pop- ifs and the excessive contrast being a danger to the eyes ular. Birmingham was the center of the industry in and even with the then-primitive state of fake news England. Success in the business at the upper end re- and social networking, these views took a rm hold. quired meticulous attention to be paid to the ne detail Foreign printers, however, such as Benjamin Franklin, of every aspect of the manufacturing process. We see Giambattista Bodoni and Pierre Simon Fournier were remnants of the japanning method in older electrical highly impressed by his designs, which led to the de- transformers, whose windings bear layers of insulating velopment of the “modern” style, for which Baskerville shellac built up in a similar manner.) is labelled a “transitional” font. Following Baskerville’s In his mid-forties, Baskerville moved away from death in 1775, his wife sold all his machinery, punches the japanning business back to his roots and started a and matrices to Beaumarchais in Paris for £3700, hav- rm devoted to high-quality printing. He was wealthy ing found no one in Britain willing to make an oer, enough to not have to be concerned about making such was the popularity of Caslon. These were used money from bread-and-butter jobs and could focus by Beaumarchais in his massive eort, requiring the on high-end projects. At that time William Caslon purchase of three paper mills, to print in Germany the was the dominant gure in English typography. His complete works of Voltaire, then banned from publi- eponymous font was wildly popular both in England cation in France. The surviving punches and matrices and America (U.S. Constitution!) but derivative, being were eventually donated back to Cambridge University based on other old-style fonts that had been available in the early twentieth century. Baskerville has continued for many years, carried to some calligraphic extremes. to be a French favorite, being used as the text font in Baskerville’s idea for a typeface that would reect many of their mainstream mathematical publications. his ideals of stately, sober perfection was released in By 1765, Baskerville appears to have tired of the 1757. In contrast to the playfulness and asymmetries of printing business and later abandoned it entirely. In old-style fonts, his designs relied on simplicity of form 1768, a punch-cutter named Isaac Moore, who worked and a strict attention to detail. The characteristics, new for a Bristol print foundry owned by Joseph Fry, cut an to that era, were: imitation of Baskerville that did not require the highest • very regular glyphs, with few embellishments; level of equipment, paper and ink. It is now considered • curved strokes that are close to circular, at least in that Fry’s Baskerville, as it is now called, has more in the roman and bold; common with later fonts such as Bell, Bulmer and Scotch • sharply cut serifs; Roman. In 1923, Morris Fuller Benton designed for • the axis of rounded forms became almost vertical; • high contrast (ratio of thickest to thinnest strokes). 1 It being essential to rst possess a large fortune. Michael Sharpe TUGboat, Volume 38 (2017), No. 1 29 American Type Foundry (ATF) a revival of Fry’s Bas- worked set of inferior and superior gures at ap- kerville with a new italic to replace the original poorly proximately 60% of the size of its lining gures. thought-of version in Fry’s Baskerville. This version (The pre-built fractions, like ¾, were remade to appears in several of their catalogs, which have been use the larger gures, and the \textfrac macro scanned at high resolution by Raph Levien and are attempts to provide other fractions with attention available from TUG to interested parties. paid to appropriate spacing.) In 2012, Pablo Impallari and Rodrigo Fuenzalida • LB has only gures in its superiors. B adds supe- created a new web font, Libre Baskerville, that seems to rior upper and lower case letters, with eacute and be based on tracing the scans of the images above, as egrave the only accented superior letters. described in [KB01]. The x-height was increased, the • LB has no small caps. All four styles of B contain ascenders were shortened, and the contrast was lowered a Small Cap alphabet containing all characters in substantially, while the serifs and tails were thickened the T1 encoding. considerably. Their font was well done technically (very • An LY1 encoding is provided. This may be of in- good spacing and kerning) but did not look especially terest principally to Scandinavian users who wish close to Baskerville, in my opinion. to have access to the fj and ffj ligatures, for ex- 2 BaskervilleF ample, in typesetting ord. (There is no room left in the T1 encoding for these ligatures.) The other In discussions with Karl Berry at the TUG meeting in unusual ligatures available in LY1 are fb ( ), fh Toronto, 2016, I expressed my interest in making a () and fk (). version of Baskerville more attuned to the interests of As otf versions of the fonts are provided, they traditional T X users, and Karl later supplied me with E may be used directly in Unicode T X by means of a wealth of information about doing this starting from E the fontspec package. The baskervillef package Raph Levien’s scans.2 Remaking the fonts from scratch provides baskervillef.fontspec, a le specifying the lacked appeal, and once I examined Libre Baskerville names of the relevant otf les. It is loaded automat- closely, I saw that much could be achieved by undoing ically by fontspec, so it suces to include in your their transformations to web fonts—reducing the x- preamble: heights, increasing the ascender heights, sharpening the serifs and hollowing out the glyphs to raise the contrast \usepackage{fontspec} \setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]% and reduce the heaviness. Wherever possible, I kept {baskervillef} the side-bearings the same so that the new spacings and A kernings were as similar as possible to those of Libre Usage under LTEX has several options that are spelled Baskerville. out in detail in the package documentation. For math typesetting to accompany BaskervilleF, 2.1 Additions one may use the package newtxmath with the option In reworking Libre Baskerville, abbreviated below to LB, baskerville. For instance: to BaskervilleF, abbreviated below to B, there were some \usepackage{baskervillef} major additions, listed here. \usepackage[baskerville,vvarbb]{newtxmath} \usepackage[cal=boondoxo,frak=boondox]{mathalfa} • LB provides no bold italic style—B adds one. Al- though most users most likely make little use of Some sample output: bold italic in text, apart perhaps from titles in some A Simple Central Limit Theorem: packages, it is essential for producing a proper bold Let X1, X2; ··· be a sequence of i.i.d. random variables with math italic alphabet. mean 0 and variance 1 on a probability space ¹Ω; F; Prº. • LB had only one normal sized gure style, propor- Let ¹ y e−t2/2 tional lining.3 B contains four such styles, adding N¹ yº B p dt; tabular lining, tabular oldstyle and proportional −∞ 2π n lining, the default being tabular lining, which is Õ S X : needed for proper mathematical gure spacing. n B k 1 • LB has superior and inferior gures at just 40% Then of the size of its lining gures. B contains a re- S Pr pn ≤ y −−−−! N¹ yº n!1 2 It is a pleasure to acknowledge Karl’s encouragement and very n useful technical feedback throughout this project.