French king Louis XIV wanted to create and establish a type face that could be used for royal printing. The process that went along with the creation of this new type face, Tomain du Rio, included creating grids and a shift from the "old style" roman type. New ideas like this spread throughout France creating new fonts such as rococo. Fournier le Jeune worked with this font to create a complete design system as well as a few published books that revealed information to improving measurement systems. William Caslon stepped into the picture and created the Caslon Old Style font (used in America’s Declaration of Independence). After Caslon, Baskerville appeared to create a font that represented the transitional style between the Old Style and modern type design. He also created paper that was smooth and glossy which is a new way of seeing paper. Finally Bodoni came along redesigning the Roman letterforms and constructing alphabets of interchangeable parts.
One thing that I find very interesting is the invention of different paper. Baskerville created this glossy smooth paper from hot-pressed wove paper. This pattern that was introduced to the world, caused controversy due to the fact that Baskerville would not give out his secret as to how he created the paper. Jealousy caused some critics to give bad reviews of his paper. It is very interesting to see that a new creation had somewhat of a negative effect all because he would not reveal his secret. The culture was concerned with different style inks, illuminated manuscripts and other accessories on a page that no one thought of changing up the quality of the paper.
One question I pose is that on page 118, it says that French law prevented type-founders from printing. Why were they unable to print? Also on page 121 it says that Charles II demanded the number of printers be reduced to twenty “by death or otherwise”. Why does it matter how many printers were available at that time period?
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