This 'Type Talk' is part of the Baskerville 250 Anniversary Season and will provide a short history of Baskerville’s typographic punches, the only extant evidence of the printer’s Birmingham workshop. The punches are now house in the Historic Printing Room at Cambridge University Library and are currently the subject of a three-year collaborative research project between Birmingham City University and the University of Cambridge. The project involves a multidisciplinary team which draws together artefact analysis, archaeometallurgy, digital humanities, jewellery, printing history, and type design. The work has helped us unpick their 250-year journey from eighteenth-century Birmingham to a castle in Kehl, Germany, to revolutionary France, and enduring German occupation of Paris, to eventually return to post-war England and the calm of Cambridge University.

Caroline Archer-Parré is Professor of Typography and Co-director of the Centre for Printing History & Culture, and Chair of both the Baskerville Society and Print Networks. With a specific interest in Baskerville and Birmingham’s printing past, she is Co-Investigator of the AHRC-funded project, ‘Small Performances: investigating the typographic punches of John Baskerville through heritage science and practice-based research’. With an interest in midland’s typographic history from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, Caroline has published widely, contributes to numerous journals, and writes regularly for the trade and academic press. She is also General Editor for the Printing History & Culture series, published by Peter Lang.