---
title: "Baskerville (1757) — John Baskerville"
description: "Baskerville was designed by John Baskerville in 1757. What it signals, where you have seen it."
url: https://atoneplace.net/font/baskerville/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Baskerville

**Baskerville: John Baskerville, 1757**

Serif · Transitional, high-contrast, formal. Certificates, university crests, anything wanting authority.

Baskerville pushed the contrast between thick and thin strokes further than anything before it, which required him to also invent smoother paper and blacker ink to print it — the typeface and the technology arrived together. Contemporaries hated it and claimed the sharpness damaged the eyes. A widely reported study by Errol Morris in 2012 found readers marginally more likely to agree with a statement set in Baskerville than in other faces, which is a fun result that has not been strongly replicated.

## The facts

- **Designed by:** John Baskerville
- **Released:** 1757
- **Classification:** Serif
- **What it signals now:** Transitional, high-contrast, formal. Certificates, university crests, anything wanting authority.

## Where you have seen it

- Academic publishing
- Wedding stationery
- Diploma and certificate printing

> This page describes the typeface rather than showing it. Displaying a specimen requires a licensed font file and almost none of these may be redistributed, so the descriptions name the letters to look at instead.

## Common questions

### Who designed Baskerville?

John Baskerville, in 1757.

### What is Baskerville used for?

Transitional, high-contrast, formal. Certificates, university crests, anything wanting authority. You will have seen it on Academic publishing, Wedding stationery, Diploma and certificate printing.

## Related pages

- [Typefaces from the 1750s](https://atoneplace.net/font/decade/1750s/)
- [Garamond](https://atoneplace.net/font/garamond/)
- [Caslon](https://atoneplace.net/font/caslon/)
- [Didot](https://atoneplace.net/font/didot/)
- [Bodoni](https://atoneplace.net/font/bodoni/)
- [Times New Roman](https://atoneplace.net/font/times-new-roman/)
- [Trajan](https://atoneplace.net/font/trajan/)
- [Georgia](https://atoneplace.net/font/georgia/)

## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]