John Baskerville’s Decorated Papers

Disregarded by the eighteenth-century book trade and dismissed by subsequent paper historians, Baskerville’s end papers have generally been disdained as amateurish, inconsistent and lacking in both technical and aesthetic proficiency. This chapter, however, re-evaluates Baskerville’s marbled paper and suggests that the marbling was done in a novel and possibly ground-breaking manner for the period, using colours from Baskerville's japanning business. Rather than following popular European trends in marbling, may have been influenced by a lesser-known Ottoman Turkish form of marbling known as yazali-ebrû. The chapter concludes that Baskerville’s marbled paper should be viewed as a considered and reasoned trial rather than an unsophisticated and failed experiment, which, although unacceptable to the eighteenth-century eye, can now be understood as being ahead of its time.