DURING THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, Baskerville—the man and the typeface—underwent a revival as printing historians and practising typographers, bibliographers and bibliophiles, librarians and local historians and even the popular press turned their attention to the life, work and lasting legacy of Birmingham's famous printer.

Baskerville's typographic revival began in 1909 when the Sheffield type foundry, Stephenson Blake and Co., began commercially recasting founts of Fry's Baskerville; in 1915, the American Type Founders Co. followed suit when it issued its own version of Baskerville; and in 1924, the Monotype Corporation produced a typeface based on Baskerville's Great Primer which went on to become one of the most popular and enduring interpretations of the original typeface. Subsequently, nearly every type foundry has issued an adaptation of Baskerville whether for metal composition, photosetting or digital reproduction and Baskerville has consistently been ranked among the world's most popular and well-used typefaces.

The first sign of a scholarly awakening of interest in Baskerville began in the late-nineteenth century when the Athenaeum Librarian, Henry Richard Tedder, produced an article about the printer for inclusion in volume 3 of the Oxford dictionary of national biography(1885). Tedder's work was informed by material collected by the notable Birmingham bibliophile Samuel Timmins, who had amassed a large collection of books, manuscripts and other documen-tation for his intended, but never executed, Baskerville monograph. Tedder and Timmins ignited an interest in Baskerville which was further developed by Ralph Straus and Robert Dent, who, drawing on the Timmins collection, issued the printer's first biography, John Baskerville: a memoir(1907). This book paved the way for additional publications which included Phillip Gaskell's John Baskerville: a bibliography(1959) and culminated with F. E. Pardoe's John Baskerville of Birmingham: letter-founder and printer(1975). Alongside books devoted to the printer, a variety of articles also appeared in both trade and scholarly journals, many of which were written in response to the return of Baskerville's punches to Cambridge from Paris in 1953: an event of sufficient importance to warrant two editorials in The Times.