page_title: Art of Birmingham
section_title: Early English typography
hierarchical_section_title: Art of Birmingham / Design / Early English typography
caption_attribution_description: English: Crop of the title page of John Baskerville's Bible, typeset for the Cambridge University Press in 1763.
context_page_description: Birmingham has a distinctive culture of art and design that emerged in the 1750s, driven by the historic importance of the applied arts to the city's manufacturing economy. While other early industrial towns such as Manchester and Bradford were based on the manufacture of bulk commodities such as cotton and wool, Birmingham's economy from the 18th century onwards was built on the production of finished manufactured goods for European luxury markets. The sale of these products was dependent on high-quality design, and this resulted in the early growth of an extensive infrastructure for the education of artists and designers and for exhibiting their works, and placed Birmingham at the heart of debate about the role of the visual arts in the emerging industrial society.
  The city's history in the fine arts also betrays this influence, with many of Birmingham's most notable artistic figures coming from a commercial or craft background.
context_section_description: Birmingham has been a centre for the printing of books at least as far back as the 1650s, and the area's earliest notable contribution to design was in the field of typography, where it achieved international importance in the 18th Century and played a prominent role in the rise of English influence in a field previously dominated by German, Italian, French and Dutch designers. William Caslon – the designer of the Caslon typefaces and the first significant English typographer – came from nearby Cradley, and almost certainly trained as an engraver in Birmingham in the years before 1716. Most notable however was the Birmingham printer John Baskerville, who designed the Baskerville typeface in 1754. The influence of this type design across Europe would be huge as one of the key milestones in the transition from the old-style typefaces of Fournier to the modern-style type of Bodoni and Didot, and it is a font still widely used today in applications from the logo of New York's Metropolitan Opera to the branding of the Federal Government of Canada. Several of Baskerville's employees went on to become type designers themselves, most notably William Martin, whose Bulmer typeface is also still widely used.
  Baskerville's design innovations extended beyond type design itself into typesetting, graphic design and page layout, where he moved away from the then-current use of decorative symbols and embellishments, instead emphasising the use of visual proportion and white space to maintain aesthetic appeal. In the words of a 2001 British Library publication, "such simplicity, even minimalism, was revolutionary. It was a defining moment in bookmaking, ridding it of the  irrelevant, flowery decoration of hitherto".
caption: Bible typeset by John Baskerville for Cambridge University Press in 1763
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