Craven Street,
London, 1760.
Dear Sir,
Let me give you a pleasant instance of the prejudice some
have entertained against your work. Soon after I returned, discoursing with a
gentleman concerning the artists of Birmingham, he said you would be a means of
blinding all the readers in the nation; for the strokes of your letters being
too thin and narrow, hurt the eye, and he could never read a line of them
without pain. I thought, said I, you were going to complain of the gloss of the
paper, some object to. “No, no,” said he, “I have heard that mentioned, but it
is not that; it is in the form and cut of the letters themselves; they have not
that height and thickness of the stroke, which makes the common printing so
much the more comfortable to the eye.” — You see this gentleman was a connoisseur.
In vain I endeavoured to support your character against the charge; he knew
what he felt, and could see the reason of it, and several other gentlemen among
his friends had made the same observation, &c. Yesterday he called to visit
me, when, mischievously bent to try his judgment, I stepped into my closet, tore
off the top of Mr. Caslon's1 specimen, and produced it to him as
yours, brought with me from Birmingham; saying, I had been examining it, since
he spoke to me, and could not for my life perceive the disproportion he
mentioned, desiring him to point it out to me. He readily undertook it, and
went over the several founts, shewing me every where what he thought instances
of that disproportion; and declared, that he could not then read the specimen
without feeling very strongly the pain he had mentioned to me. I spared him
that time, the confusion of being told, that these were the types, he had been
reading all his life with so much ease to his eyes; the types his adored Newton
is printed with, on which he has pored not a little; nay, the very types his
own book is printed with; (for he is himself an author) and yet never
discovered this painful disproportion in them, till he thought they were yours.
I am, &c.
B. Franklin.
_______________
* John Baskerville,
the celebrated type-founder and printer, was born in 1706, at Wolverley, in the
County of Worcester. Having a small estate of about sixty pounds a year, he was
not bred to any profession; but in 1746, he became a schoolmaster at
Birmingham, which he continued many years. Afterwards he entered upon the japanning
business, which succeeded so well as to enable him to purchase a country house
and to set up his carriage; each pannel of which was a distinct picture, and
the whole might be considered as a pattern card of his trade. In 1750, he began
business as a type-founder, on which he spent many hundreds before he could
produce a letter to please himself. By perseverance he overcame all obstacles,
and in 1756 published an edition of Virgil in quarto, which was followed by
Paradise Lost, the Bible, Common Prayer, and several other works. In 1765, he
applied to Dr. Franklin, then at Paris, to sound the literati there respecting
the purchase of his types, but the proposal was not accepted. They were many
years after purchased by the celebrated M. De Beaumarchais, and employed in the
printing his edition of the works of Voltaire. Baskerville died at Birmingham,
in 1775; and as he had an aversion to churchyards, he was by his own direction
buried in a mausoleum erected on his own grounds.
1 An eminent type-engraver and letter-founder in
London.
SOURCE: William Temple Franklin, The Private Correspondence
of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 1, p. 5-7
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