JOHN BASKERVILLE published around sixty books and cast the types to print them – twenty-six founts, including the several sizes of roman and italic of essentially the same design, plus a Greek type commissioned by Oxford University’s Clarendon Press for their edition of the New Testament in Greek.

   Just those volumes in my possession are shown in photographs on this site or made available for download as pdf documents. The News section logs their appearance online as the site gradually expands.

   Baskerville’s books were exceptional achievements from the very first book he printed, an edition of Virgil's works which burst upon the scene with some éclat in 1757. That publication was followed at intervals to form by 1773 a group of classical Roman literary works in reassuringly large quartos; Baskerville printed some of those texts in pocket-sized editions, too.

   It is the handsome quarto classics that form the bulk of John Baskerville’s work reproduced on this site, including his famous edition of Virgil's Bucolica, Georgica, et Aeneis, 1757.

IN ADDITION to the Baskerville works on this site, I have published an illustrated book, John Baskerville: Shaping the Alphabet, which can be found by entering the term 'John Baskerville' into the search box at www.blurb.co.uk/bookstore.

   As a publish-on-demand service, the cost is high despite being a publication that makes no profit, but the complete book may be viewed in preview. The optimum size for reading is on a 20+ inch screen while the 300+ illustrations are somewhat less affected by a smaller screen. To make reading easier at a smaller scale, a text-only pdf file is offered:

​John Baskerville: Shaping the Alphabet

Text only, 550 KB