Benjamin Franklin, Smartass

Celebrated my 39th birthday yesterday in part by taking myself to a cherished haunt for lunch: a well-stocked used bookstore next to a Straw Hat Pizza to which I can retire to read my new acquisitions with a favorite dish: pineapple pizza, light on the sauce.

Found this gem:

To John Baskerville [inventor of the then-newfangled “Baskerville” type, or “font” for you youngins], Craven Street, London, 1760

Dear Sir,

Let me give you a pleasant Instance of the Prejudice some have entertained against your Work. Soon after I returned, discoursing with a Gentleman concerning the Artists of Birmingham, he said you would [be] a Means of Blinding all the Readers in the Nation; for the Strokes of your Letters, being too thin and narrow, hurt the Eye, and he could never read a line of them without Pain. I thought, said I, [that he] was going to complain of the Gloss of the Paper…. No, no, says he, I have heard that mentioned, but it is not that; it Is in the Form and Cut of the Letters themselves; they have not that Height and Thickness of the Stroke, which make the common Printing so much the more comfortable to the Eye.

You see this Gentleman was a Connoisseur.

In vain I endeavoured to support your Character against this Charge…. Yesterday he called to visit me, when, mischievously bent to try his Judgment, I stept into my Closet, tore off the Top of Mr. Caslon’s specimen, and produced it to him as yours… saying, I had been examining it, since he spoke to me, and could not for my Life perceive the Disproportion he mentioned, desiring him to point it out to me.

He readily undertook it, and went over the several Founts, shewing me every where what he thought Instances of that Disproportion; and declared, that he could not then read the Specimen, without feeling very strongly the Pain he had mentioned to me.

I spared him that Time the Confusion of being told that these were the Types he had been reading all his life with so much Ease to his Eyes; … nay, the very Types his own Book is printed with… and yet never discovered this painful Disproportion in them, till he thought they were yours.

I am, etc.

B. Franklin

From Mr. Franklin: A Selection from his Personal Letters, edited by Leonard W. Labaree and Whitfield J. Bell, Jr., Yale University Press, 1956 (250th anniversary of Franklin’s birth). A gorgeous lightly-used copy that cost me $3.00.

Compare for yourself: Caslon type vs. Baskerville type.