Inhuming and exhuming: Baskerville’s death, burial, and post-mortem life

Supported by the Friends of Birmingham Archives and Heritage, the Chris Upton Memorial Lecture will be given by Professor Caroline Archer-Parré.

Baskerville, with its well-considered design and elegant proportions is one of the world’s most widely used and influential typefaces. It was created by John Baskerville (1707–75) of Birmingham, an eighteenth-century typographer, printer, and industrialist; an Enlightenment figure with a worldwide reputation who changed the course of type design. But while printing historians have lauded Baskerville for his contributions to the trade, he is popularly remembered for his unusual will, unconventional burial, and extraordinary post-mortem life. It is a story which has been retold over the course of 250 years, and which has contributed to the making of Baskerville’s erroneous reputation and his incorrect labelling as an atheist. This talk looks at the evidence of Baskerville's death and burial and reappraises the facts surrounding his post-mortem activities to correct the misapprehensions which surround Baskerville and to reassess him as a Deist rather than atheist.

Caroline Archer-Parré is Professor of Typography and Co-director of the Centre for Printing History & Culture at Birmingham City University / University of Birmingham, and Chair of the Baskerville Society. She is Co-Investigator of the AHRC-funded project,‘Small Performances: investigating the typographic punches of John Baskerville through heritage science and practice-based research’. With an interest in typographic history from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, Caroline has published widely. She is the author of three books, including The Kynoch Press 1876-1981: the anatomy of a printing house (2000), Tart Cards: London’s illicit advertising art (2003) and Paris Underground (2005). With Malcolm Dick she has co-edited John Baskerville: Art and Industry of the Enlightenment (2017) Pen, Print and Communication in the Eighteenth Century (2020) and James Watt, 1736-1819: Culture, Innovation and Enlightenment (2020).

Doors open at 5pm and the lecture will begin at 5.30pm.

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Host or Publisher Birmingham Archives & Collections (Wolfson Centre)