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CXCIII: TO JOHN BASKERVILLE 2 - Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. III Letters and Misc. Writings 1753-1763 [1904]

Edition used:

The Works of Benjamin Franklin, including the Private as well as the Official and Scientific Correspondence, together with the Unmutilated and Correct Version of the Autobiography, compiled and edited by John Bigelow (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904). The Federal Edition in 12 volumes. Vol. III (Letters and Misc. Writings 1753-1763).

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CXCIII

TO JOHN BASKERVILLE2

  • 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,” says 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 make 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’s 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 fonts, showing me everywhere 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.

[2 ]John Baskerville, a celebrated English printer, was born in the year 1706. He inherited a small estate, and occupied himself for several years in teaching a school at Birmingham. Possessing a taste for painting, he entered into a lucrative branch of japanning, in which business he continued for life, and acquired by it a fortune, which made him independent. In the year 1750, he turned his thoughts towards an improvement in type-founding and printing. Several years were spent before he could produce such types as pleased him, and he expended six hundred pounds in the process. The profits of the undertaking, however, were not in proportion to the enterprise and expense attending it, as will be seen by the following extract from a letter which he wrote to Dr. Franklin, dated Birmingham, September 7, 1767. Dr. Franklin was at that time on a visit to Paris.

“After having obtained the reputation of excelling in the most useful art known to mankind, of which I have your testimony, is it not to the last degree provoking, that I cannot get even bread by it? I must starve, had I no other dependence. I have offered the London booksellers to print for them within five per cent as low as their common currency, but cannot get from them a single job. I offered my whole apparatus of letter-founding, printing, etc., to the Court of France by the Duke de Nivernois, when he was ambassador here, for eight thousand pounds, which was politely refused as being too large a sum Mr. Godfroy, who may be heard of at Mr. Sayde’s, optician to the King, lately told our good friend, Mr. Boulton, that France wished to be possessed of my printing, &c., on moderate terms, in which I heartily join.

The intention of this is, therefore, to beg the favor of you to propose and recommend this affair, as Mr. Godfroy may point out the way. I want only to set on foot a treaty, if they will not come to my terms, I may possibly come to theirs. Suppose we reduce the price to six thousand pounds. Louis the Fourteenth would have given three times that sum, or Czar Peter. Let the reason of my parting with it be, the death of my son and intended successor, and, having acquired a moderate fortune, I wish to consult my ease in the afternoon of life, as I am now turned of sixty.”

The French government did not accept the offer. Baskerville died on the 8th of January, 1775. In the year 1779, his types were purchased by a literary Society in Paris for £3700, and were employed in printing Beaumarchais’ edition of Voltaire.