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Baskervville

Designed By

ANRT

8 Styles Serif

The pleasure
of a well-set
page.

Baskervville · Regular

Compare this serif family in headings and a continuous reading sample.

8 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.

Download Baskervville ↓

TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1

Set Your Own Text

Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.

Printed at Strasbourg, 1784

A Page In Baskervville

Baskervville · Regular

Headings, labels and running text.

Notes From The Reading Room

The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.

A heading marks the next chapter. The margins leave room for a note while the text continues across the page.

8 Styles,
One Family

Every available style is shown below in its own font file.

Regular400

Printed at Strasbourg, 1784

Italic400

Printed at Strasbourg, 1784

Medium500

Printed at Strasbourg, 1784

Medium Italic500

Printed at Strasbourg, 1784

Semi Bold600

Printed at Strasbourg, 1784

Semi Bold Italic600

Printed at Strasbourg, 1784

Bold700

Printed at Strasbourg, 1784

Bold Italic700

Printed at Strasbourg, 1784

The double v is a joke with a source. Claude Jacob sold his type as “caractères dans le genre Baskerwille”, Baskerville-like fonts, spelled with a w, and when the students at ANRT revived his work they kept the wink and named it Baskervville.

So this is a revival of a revival. The story behind it is good enough to tell in some detail:

  • 1779. Sarah Eaves sells Baskerville’s punches and equipment to Beaumarchais, who sets up a printing house in Kehl, 6 kilometers from Strasbourg. Soon after, a Kehl employee named Claude Jacob is sent to Birmingham to check and repair the punches.
  • 1784. Back home, Jacob falls out with his employer and leaves with Henri Rolland to found a type foundry in Strasbourg, the only one in the city at the time. Their first specimen calls Jacob a pupil of Baskerville, which was a stretch; he got to Birmingham 7 years after Baskerville died.
  • 1789. Rolland and Jacob win the title of printer to the King, and the other printers of Strasbourg take them to court. The partnership ends the same year after a disagreement.
  • 1790. Jacob joins the Levrault family, printers in the city, and keeps cutting type for them. His Baskerwille is distributed by the Berger-Levrault foundry from 1815.

What makes Jacob’s version more than a copy is its split personality. The roman stays close to Baskerville. The italic leans toward Didot, so in 1 family you can watch type move from the transitional style to the modern one.

ANRT ran a 5 day workshop in 2017 to digitize it, with students Alexis Faudot, Rémi Forte, Morgane Pierson, Rafael Ribas, Tanguy Vanlaeys and Rosalie Wagner under Charles Mazé and Thomas Huot-Marchand, and Wagner then developed and engineered the font. In 2025 Huot-Marchand added a bold, and Wagner fixed kerning and the glyph set and improved the outlines for screens.

The family now runs to 8 styles, Regular through Bold, each with its italic, and it carries small caps, fractions, discretionary ligatures and old style and lining figures in both proportional and tabular widths. For a novel or a literary journal we would set the text in Regular and save that Didot-ish italic for titles of works, where it gets noticed.

Baskervville type specimen with letters and figures
Baskervville · Type Specimen

Characters & Figures

411 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !

View The Recorded Character Selection
!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~¡¢£¤¥¦§¨©ª«¬®¯°±²³´µ·¸¹º»¼½¾¿ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿĀāĂ㥹ĆćĊċČčĎďĐđĒēĖėĘęĚěĞğĠġĢģĤĥĦħĪīĮįİıIJijĶķĹĺĻļĽľĿŀŁłŃńŅņŇňŊŋŌōŐőŒœŔŕŖŗŘřŚśŞşŠšŢţŤťŦŧŨũŪūŬŭŮůŰűŲųŴŵŶŷŸŹźŻżŽžƑƒǍǎǏǐǑǒǓǔǕǖǗǘǙǚǛǜǺǻȘșȚțȷˆˇ˘˙˚˛˜˝̵̶̷̸̧̨̦̀́̂̃̄̆̇̈̊̋̌̒ẀẁẂẃẄẅẞỲỳỸỹ–—‘’‚“”„†‡•…‰‹›⁄⁰⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹₀₁₂₃₄₅₆₇₈₉€™∅−∞≈≠

The Font Files

Download
Baskervville

8 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.

Download ZIP · 325 KB ↓
Version
1.100
License
SIL Open Font License 1.1
Read The Font License ↗

Install On Your Computer

Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.

Use On A Website

Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.

<link rel="stylesheet"
  href="/fonts/baskervville/baskervville.css">

body {
  font-family: 'Baskervville', sans-serif;
}

Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.

Heading & Body

The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.

Baskervville Heading · Inter Body

Notes From The Reading Room

The reading room opens onto a quiet courtyard. Along the shelves, small handwritten labels mark the collections. A visitor leaves a book open beside the window, keeping a place for the next reader.