John Baskerville

John Baskerville was born in Worcestershire in 1706. He was a businessman who learnt printing and typography. He became a member of the Royal Arts Society and an associate of various members of the Lunar Society. Today, Baskerville is renowned for the typefaces he created, thanks to revivals of his work, the typefaces have been transformed into digital form, giving us fonts such as: Baskerville, and Mrs Eaves (After his wife, Sarah Eaves). John was also responsible for many innovations in the world of printing, but also in ink and paper production. Being a renaissance Humanist, he was highly atheistic, but this did not prevent him from printing the first ever Folio Bible in 1763. He also printed many documents for the University of Cambridge, which have still been conserved today. At his request, when he died, Baskerville's body was buried in the unconsecrated garden of his house, Easy Hill. Later, his body was moved because the land was needed to construct a canal, the corpse was stored in a warehouse for sometime before being secretly moved to the crypt at Christ Church, Birmingham. This Church was demolished in 1899, so the body was moved once again, but this time back to Easy Hill, where a cemetery had been built in his memory.