Baskerville Press

Date range: 1757-1774

Medium: Printed

Number of items: 40 items (dispersed).

The Library holds over half of the entire output of John Baskerville (1706-1775) of Birmingham, England's greatest 18th-century printer.

Baskerville's first and arguably finest work, Virgil's Bucolica, Georgica, et Aeneis (Birmingham: John Baskerville, 1757) is available in two different states, one with the extra illustrations supplied by the plates from John Ogilby's The Works of Publius Vergilius Maro (London: Warren, 1654). Among other classical authors are Horace (1762), Lucretius (1772) and Terence (1772).

English works include John Milton (1608-1674) published in 1758 and 1759, Joseph Addison (1672-1719) published in 1761, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) published in 1773, together with the Book of Common Prayer of 1760-62, and the Bibles of 1763 and 1769-72. Many titles are available in the Library in multiple copies.

Further information:

• Recorded in Library Search.
• Marked-up copy of Philip Gaskell, John Baskerville: A Bibliography, reprinted with add. and corr. (Chicheley: Paul P. B. Minet, 1973) available via Special Collections reading rooms.
• David W. Riley, 'English Books of the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, with Particular Reference to History and Literature', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, vol. 71 no. 2 (Summer 1989), pp. 87-102 (pp. 95-96).

Location:

• The John Rylands Library, Deansgate  [Map]
• Find out how to use the reading rooms in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library