ITC New Baskerville Font Field Guide

Best Practices

The original Baskerville typeface was created for setting books, and its modern revivals are ideally suited to the setting of continuous text. Magazines, booklets, brochures, pamphlets and long form digitally imaged copy are natural uses.

Family

Four weights of regular designs – each with a complementary italic.

Font Facts

• Baskerville’s contemporaries rebuked his type as being too light. Some even believed that reading it would cause blindness. Benjamin Franklin, however, liked the Baskerville types and purchased several fonts from the Birmingham printer.
   
• John Baskerville was an atheist and was buried in a mausoleum he had erected on his own grounds.

Roots

Modern Baskerville fonts are based on the type of John Baskerville, the 18th century English printer and type founder. His original type has its foundation in the Caslon design, but is more precise, and has more contrast in character stroke thickness. Baskerville is the first “Transitional” design between Old Styles, typified by Caslon and Garamond, and Neo Classical designs such as Bodoni and Didot.

The first modern revival of Baskerville’s fonts was in 1923, under the design direction of Stanley Morison for Monotype.

Through a licensing arrangement, ITC gained the rights to Linotype’s New Baskerville family and released its version, called ITC New Baskerville, in 1982.

Legibility

The ITC New Baskerville design is exceptionally legible, with a genial, attractive feel. More than easy to read, it is inviting to the reader. Because the design has a marked contrast between thick and thin strokes, on-screen textual content should be reviewed for character fidelity and readability.

Download a pdf version of the ITC Baskerville font field guide and view the ITC Baskerville.