BASKERVILLE ENTERED A COMPETITION for a premium (monetary prize) set by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (now the Royal Society of Arts) in 1759 for marbled paper. There were only two entrants, John Cross and John Baskerville. A committee was struck to evaluate the prizes. The committee first gave the prize to Cross, then, six weeks later, with a different membership, changed its mind and claimed that Baskerville deserved the premium. But when Baskerville's samples were presented to the larger Society, it decided that no prize would be awarded.

There are two considerations here: first, why the prize was significant, and second, why Baskerville's paper lost the prize in the end. The official notice in the list of premiums provides clues: ‘For marbling the greatest quantity, equal in goodness to the best marbled paper from abroad, not less than one ream; to be produced on [or] before the second Tuesday in February, 1760, £10’. The Society's very name indicates its purpose was to encourage art but in a commercial manner where possible. With neither government subsidies nor agencies to encourage domestic produc-tivity, the private efforts of the Society were an important incentive to British industry. England did not have a commercially viable decorated paper manufactory, but the Society saw an opportunity for one to replace foreign imports. Thus, their notion was quantity as an indication of possible commercial production rather than simply the work of a dilettante, bookbinder or boxmaker who occasionally made papers for a specific project. Presumably, the person who marbled the greatest number of sheets of paper would be the prize-winner so long as the design was ‘equal in goodness to the best marbled paper from abroad’. Probably the ‘goodness’ registered in the committee members’ minds as being essentially replicas of German, Dutch or French papers. The ‘best’ would be uniform for use in bookbinding or box lining, such that piecing papers for large work would be feasible without looking careless.

Although marbled papers are occasionally found in Western European bookbinding from the mid-fifteenth century, the use of marbled paper as an adornment in English bookbinding is rare before the third decade of the seventeenth century; even then it is largely found only as endpapers (sometimes just pastedowns) and almost invariably restricted to the higher-class grades of work.