![]() ![]() I formed to myself ideas of greater accuracy than had yet appeared, and had endeavored to produce a set of types according to what I conceived to be their true proportion.”Īs Baskerville continued to experiment with printing technology he developed brighter woven paper and richer black inks. “Having been an early admirer of the beauty of letters,” said Baskerville in 1758, “I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them. By that time, the Romain du Roi hadn’t been subject to a great deal of use, but the distinct shift in style it represented would heavily influence type designers in the eighteenth century - like Englishman John Baskerville -who were working to refine the new transitional letterform style.īaskerville’s experiments went beyond the Caslon faces to include ink manufacturing, paper making, and press refinements, which all culminated in the attempt to make his faces more legible and reflect Baskerville’s ideals of perfection. The first book to be printed in the King’s Roman was released in 1702, but it took until 1745 for the full set of 82 fonts to be completed. ![]() Morrison wrote: “Its horizontal and unbracketed structure symbolizes a complete break with the humanist calligraphic tradition.” According to Stanley Morrison in Letterforms: Typographic & Scriptorial (1968), the “principal graphic” novelty of the typeface lived in the design of the serif. The grid-based rationality of the King’s Roman led to a distinct vertical stress and balance that pre-dated the work of Fournier, Didot, and Bodoni. ![]() The committee also designed a complementary oblique, but Grandjean chose to create a matching italic from his own designs. Grandjean, being well-versed in the cutting of old-style faces, chose to engineer out a degree of the “cold geometry” from the letters, but left enough of the original design intact as to identify it as radically different from previous old style designs. ![]()
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