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John Baskett

active London, Oxford and Edinburgh, about 1666 - 1742

BiographyLC name authority rec. nr91010186
LC Heading: Baskett, John, 1666 or 1667-1742

Biography:

Baskett, John (1664/5–1742), stationer and printer, was the son of Roger Baskett, gentleman of Salisbury. On 4 December 1682 he was apprenticed to the London stationer Edward Darrell or Dorrell, who supplied stationery to various government offices; he was released from his indentures on 5 May 1690, after which he appears to have worked as a stationer with his former master and another stationer, Godfrey Richards. On 15 June 1691, aged twenty-six, Baskett married Sarah Briscoe (b. 1669/70), of Mortlake, Surrey, at St Faith's under St Paul's Church, London. He was noted as supplying paper to the university press at Oxford from 1693. About 1694 he petitioned the Admiralty, offering to save several thousand pounds by supplying the navy with parchment cartridges, following the imposition of paper duty, and from 1695 until 1717 he appears frequently in the Treasury books as John Baskett of Paternoster Row, a supplier of paper. He even applied for the post of commissioner for collecting paper duty. By 1700 Baskett was in partnership with Richards to supply stationery to the customs, and from 1702 (the year of Richards's death), he was also active in the printing trade with Oliver Elliston, a former fellow apprentice under Darrell, and Thomas Simpson, who had married Sarah Bacott, probably Baskett's sister, on 23 December 1693. Elliston's death in late 1706 or early 1707 resulted in the formation in 1708 of a new lucrative ten-year partnership with Simpson and Samuel Ashurst, a former Elliston apprentice who married Baskett's daughter Sarah on 7 December 1710. In 1706–7 Baskett financed the printing of a folio edition of Clarendon's History at Oxford.

As R. J. Goulden has noted, ‘the year 1710 divides Baskett's career neatly’, as it was on 10 January 1710 that the old patent for the office of king's printer expired (Goulden, ‘John Baskett’, 20). The old patentees owed Baskett and his partners at least £8000; in resolving the debt Baskett was able to acquire a half-share in the new thirty-year patent (which covered the printing of bibles and official publications), and from 1711 his name began to appear on the imprints of books printed under the patent at the printing house in Blackfriars. About April 1712 he was formally appointed as queen's printer, a position confirmed by George I about November 1714. (From 1719 he exercised the right as king's printer to publish colonial acts in London, printing the Acts of the Assembly of New York that year, of Maryland in 1723, and of Massachusetts in 1724.) In 1711 Baskett also gained a third-share in Robert Freebairn's new patent as queen's printer in Scotland, and on 2 January 1712, Oxford University agreed to allow Baskett, Ashurst, and John Williams (who managed the king's printing house in London) a twenty-one-year monopoly (from 1713) on the printing of books at the university from the following year, much to the surprise of the Stationers' Company, which had been in dispute with the university over the printing of psalters and almanacs. Little wonder that Baskett was described in a 1712 petition by ‘poor paper-makers and printers’ as
one particular man, who, having the press at Oxford in his hands, the Queen's printing-house in London, the patent for printing Bibles, &c. in England, and being now by a new grant made Her Majesty's printer in Scotland, is making a monopoly of the greatest and best part of the printing trade in Britain. (ibid., 21)
In 1716 Baskett also bought the reversionary interest of Benjamin Tooke and John Barber as queen's printers, thereby extending the life of his share in the patent to sixty years. However, in that same year he received a setback concerning his share as queen's printer in Scotland, as the right of one of the other two partners, James Watson, to print bibles in Scotland and sell them throughout Britain was confirmed by the Scottish courts. Watson duly printed bibles in 1715, 1716, 1719, and 1722. Finally Lord Mansfield in London ruled in favour of Baskett, and in 1725 Baskett, who had not previously published in Scotland, set up a printing house in Edinburgh in partnership with Freebairn and published four editions of the Bible between 1725 and 1729; from 1734 Edinburgh bibles were published with only Freebairn's name in their imprints. The extent of Baskett's printing privileges required a prodigious vigilance but he nevertheless managed to bring almost forty law cases against infringements, such as when he prosecuted William Dicey, the printer of the Northampton Mercury, in 1721 for including accounts of the king's speech.

In 1714 and 1715 Baskett served as master of the Stationers' Company, and over his working life he bound twenty-seven apprentices with the company, including the typefounder William Caslon the younger. He also employed William Norris as corrector to his press. In 1713 he published the Book of Common Prayer in three different formats, and two years later published four editions of the Bible. A condition of his lease of the university press at Oxford was the contribution of £2000 towards the building of a new university printing house; the move into Clarendon House took place in October 1713, from where, during 1716 and 1717, he printed an ambitious two-volume imperial folio bible decorated with engravings by Hoffman, Du Bosc, and Vendergulcht, later described by the bibliophile Thomas Dibdin as a magnificent work. However, it contained numerous errors and was nicknamed the Vinegar Bible from a mistranscription of the parable of the vineyard. Three special luxurious vellum copies were made, of which two remain in the British Library and the Bodleian Library. Even loose sheets of this work, described as ‘shining examples of paper and print’ by Daniel Price, were much sought (Nichols, Illustrations, 708). Baskett published a total of twelve distinct editions of the Bible during his tenure at Oxford.

Baskett had faced a cash-flow problem as soon as he took up his share of the queen's printing office, and in January 1713 had borrowed £2000 from a London fishmonger, offering his share as security. The Vinegar Bible also over-extended his resources. Between then and 1718 he borrowed further sums from James Brooks, a stationer, and John Eyre, a kinsman and London grocer. In the latter year he mortgaged his leasehold of the Oxford University Press for £4500. In 1720 he received a loan of £2000 from Ashurst, while in January 1722 Eyre agreed to take over Baskett's 1713 debt in exchange for whatever profit and goods Baskett could produce as king's printer. Nevertheless at this time Baskett's printing house contained the largest fount of double pica in England. Eyre also repaid the remaining part of the Ashurst loan, gaining further rights in the printing office as a result. In April 1723 Baskett leased out his share of the Oxford patent in return for two-thirds of the profits; however, by December, Eyre was the direct recipient for this sum. In the same month Baskett formally acknowledged a debt of nearly £25,000 to Eyre. In 1724 he sold his reversion of the office of king's printer to Eyre for £10,000. However, on 22 June 1726 Baskett sued Eyre, claiming that Eyre had misrepresented the extent of the debt. Eyre responded by seizing as many of Baskett's assets as he could, prompting a series of law cases over Baskett's privileges. In 1727 Baskett was insolvent, and within two years had gone bankrupt. He stopped attending meetings of the Stationers' Company governing body. His estate was assigned to three trustees in November 1728 while the courts continued to decide on the extent of his debts to Eyre and Ashurst. The eventual sum, almost £12,000, was repaid in June 1731 by an attorney in exchange for interest on the capital, and rights to the king's printing house. In the same year the University of Cambridge press syndics leased their right to print bibles to William Ged, the first printer in Britain to use stereotypes. Baskett challenged Ged's right to bible printing; the suit was long and protracted, reaching a conclusion only some sixteen years after Baskett's own death when king's bench found for the university, but it did succeed in restricting Ged's publication of the Bible. In 1732 he secured the renewal of the lease for the Oxford press upon its expiry in 1734. By April 1736 Baskett was able to discharge his bankruptcy and to recover some of his original assets, including the printing house itself. He was still in the process of paying off other sizeable creditors (he offered to sell the Oxford lease to the Stationers' Company in September 1737) when, on 13 January 1738, the printing office was destroyed by fire. All that survived were leaves of the Bible currently being printed; the damage was estimated at £5000. However, Baskett's business survived, owing to insurance and the loan of presses from fellow printers. Soon after, Baskett petitioned the king and was granted a forty-year monopoly for the supply of stationery to parliament.

Baskett's last publication was a duodecimo New Testament, published before he died at Blackfriars, London on 22 June 1742. His will was proved a day later, and he was buried in St Anne's Blackfriars, London. He left legacies totalling £5000, including that of his printing house to his son Thomas Baskett (bap. 1701, d. 1761), an annuity to his sons Robert and John (the latter predeceased Baskett by a month), 10s. each to his compositors and pressmen, and 5s. to each boy he employed. He also went to some lengths in his will to ensure that his remaining patents stayed in the family.

Of John's and Sarah's surviving children, Thomas and Robert followed their father's profession. Thomas was baptized in the parish of St Faith's under St Paul's on 3 July 1701; he was freed by patrimony as a member of the Stationers' Company by his father on 4 July 1732. He married Elizabeth, with whom he had a son, Mark, who was baptized in St Anne's Blackfriars on 20 October 1737. Thomas and Robert (who had served an apprenticeship with the Oxford printer Charles Combes) succeeded to the office of king's printer and the lease of the press at Oxford following their father's death, publishing bibles under their names from 1743 to 1745. In 1743 they instigated a court case against the university press at Cambridge over the right to print statutes. From 1745 only Thomas's name appears in imprints as Robert retired to Epsom in 1744, where he died at some point between 2 August 1766 when he made his will and 15 July 1767 when the will was proved. Following Robert's sale of his interest in the Oxford press in 1744, Thomas secured a new twenty-one-year lease, and it was at Oxford that, during 1756–61, he printed the important second edition of Edmund Gibson's Codex juris ecclesiae Anglicane (1761), which coincided with the reform of the university press under William Blackstone.

Thomas Baskett died on 30 March 1761, leaving Mark as his sole heir to the office of king's printer and the university press at Oxford. Mark printed bibles in 1761, 1763, and 1768 and a prayer book in 1766, but he was not interested in printing and allowed his premises to become, in one contemporary view, ‘more like an Ale House than a Printing Room’, with drunken and idle employees (Carter, 353). In 1766 he relinquished his lease of the Oxford press, and in 1784 sold the Blackfriars printing house to John Walters.

William Gibson
William Gibson, ‘Baskett, John (1664/5–1742)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/1629, accessed 15 Jan 2016]

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Last Updated8/7/24

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