If you know of John Baskerville, you probably know him as a printer from Birmingham and the inventor of the beautiful eponymous type. The volume John Baskerville: Art and Industry of the Enlightenment adds to this knowledge by examining many other areas and facets of Baskerville's work and career: the eleven chapters look at Baskerville's reputation (chapter 1), his work and networks (chapters 2–5), calligraphy, type, and bindings (chapter 6–9), and his impact (chapters 10–11). Cumulatively, the collection responds to editor Malcolm Dick's exhortation in “The Topographies of a Typographer: Mapping John Baskerville since the Eighteenth Century” that scholarship should move from a mostly hagiographical approach to contextualizing Baskerville in economic, social, and cultural histories. It achieves this goal by invoking discourses such as “printing and typographic history, the history of the book, design, social and industrial history, metals and materials and bibliography” (2).

Judging by how frequently the chapter is cited within this volume, George Demidowicz's essay, “Place, Home, and Workplace: Baskerville's Birthplace and Buildings,” is the most important contribution. From research in a wide range of sources—“manorial leases, court records, surveys and rentals” (46), as well as “rate or levy books, estate accounts, parish registers, property deeds, town maps and estate plans” (55)—Demidowicz concludes that Baskerville was not born on an estate, but in an inn on the same property that may even have been a brothel. Because he did not want to become a yeoman farmer, and because he had a talent for writing and letters, Baskerville left his home for burgeoning Birmingham. There, he rented a school in 1733, where he cut gravestones, then a separate house in 1738, and subsequently another location for his japanning works. This business was lucrative enough that Baskerville was able to lease seven acres for his Easy Hill estate in 1747. Thus, Demidowicz demonstrates how Baskerville left his roots behind, created new opportunities, and improved his social and economic position.

Gravestones and japanning come up in several other essays here. “John Baskerville: Japanner of ‘Tea Trays and other Household Goods’” by Yvonne Jones offers a fascinating account of this aspect of his career, which was so successful that it probably subsidized his printing business. He had at least nine apprentices in japanning, some of whom went on to run their own businesses, and his own business was continued by his wife Sarah. Sadly, no item japanned by the Baskervilles has yet been definitively identified. (On a side note, this volume mentions many of Sarah's contributions to John's success, but also notes that there needs to be more research specifically on Sarah.) In “John Baskerville's Decorated Papers,” which is excellently accessible to novices and informative for specialists alike, Barry McKay and Diana Patterson suggest that Baskerville may have used his japanning colors also for marbling papers. For his part, Ewan Clayton asserts in his rather technical “John Baskerville the Writing Master: Calligraphy and Type in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” that the hands Baskerville used for the gravestones indicated that he “had educated himself beyond the extent required for a simple schoolmaster” (119–20).

However, the central essay of this collection is probably “Baskerville's Birmingham: Printing and the English Urban Renaissance,” where John Hinks situates Baskerville's life in the context of Peter Borsay's work. As Borsay showed (and Hinks summarizes), the urban renaissance in provincial English towns manifested in two ways: “an improvement in the built environment and a considerable growth in the available range of cultural facilities” (27). Birmingham participated in this renaissance by creating new wealth (rather than attracting existing wealth), building new residential areas, forming local societies and networks, and contributing to national print culture. Hinks convincingly argues that these developments allowed Baskerville to become a savant-fabricant who generated knowledge, turned it into useful technologies, and distributed both.

I find his argument so important because of the way most other essays in the collection flesh it out. In “John Baskerville, William Hutton and their Social Networks,” Susan Whyman analyzes comparatively the local networks of these two individuals in Birmingham, concluding that both ended up economically successful but were limited in their social mobility because of their lack of formal education, offensive and dissenting religious views, and unusual lifestyles. In “The ‘Baskerville Bindings,’” Aurélie Martin offers William Barlow's theory that the customers of these bindings might have been Birmingham locals who did not want to send their sheets to London (183). McKay and Patterson's essay mentioned above describes how Baskerville participated in a national competition for marbled paper but ultimately lost in part because the committee considered him a mere dabbler (159). Caroline Archer-Parré, co-editor of the volume, investigates a different kind of network in “The Cambridge Cult of the Baskerville Press,” where she describes the work of the Cambridge Baskerville Club (1903–1922), which started a handlist of his publications and “created a distillation of emerging bibliographical thought” (211).

These and other essays also illustrate the limits of the urban renaissance. For instance, Whyman points out that when a group of Scottish Enlightenment travelers visited Baskerville in 1759, they considered him vulgar and uncivilized (108–10). “A Reappraisal of Baskerville's Greek Types,” by Garry Leonidas, asserts that part of the reason for the failure of these types (they were used in only two books) was “Baskerville's location in Birmingham” (149). Martin Killeen traces the afterlife of Baskerville's type in “After the ‘Perfect Book’: English Printers and their Use of Baskerville's Type, 1767–1790” and concludes that these works mostly “demonstrated uninspired composition and unremarkable presswork” (205).

Thus, John Baskerville: Art and Industry of the Enlightenment uncovers much new information about the life and career of this provincial artist and professional. Even more importantly, in essays like those of Hinks and McKay and Patterson, the collection shows how Baskerville's work and career in turn can shed new light on bigger topics such as the development of industry and letters in the English provinces.