James Felici has posted an article about “how a change in papermaking technology caused a revolution in type design (and upsetting some delicate sensibilities in the process).” He starts out
John Baskerville is known best as the man who, in the mid-18th century, created a new typeface that now bears his name. It was finer, more delicate, and lighter on the page than all that went before it, and it opened the door to a new genre of type designs: the so-called modern faces, including Bodoni and Didot. As such, Baskerville and faces like it are commonly referred to as transitionals, the bridges between oldstyle and modern.
But Baskerville’s innovative types—and those that followed—could only have existed because of his arguably more important innovation: a new papermaking technique that yielded sheets whose smoother surface could reproduce much finer detail in both type and graphics, including etchings and engravings.
Read the rest here. And see all of his articles on Creative Pros.