Philip Gaskell – författare

This 1959 bibliography lists and describes everything that came from the press of John Baskerville of Birmingham, who was appointed Printer to the University of Cambridge in 1758. After an introduction in which Dr Gaskell describes the methods that he has adopted and the conclusions that he has drawn from the investigation, there are two main parts: Specimens, Proposals and other Ephemera, and Books. Each entry contains a quasi-facsimile transcription of the title page, and gives details of formula contents amongst several other things. This, which was the first full bibliography of Baskerville's work, will be an essential tool for Baskerville collectors and for historians of printing and typography as well as for bibliographers. There are twelve collotype plates, most of which illustrate unique copies of Baskerville's ephemera; and there is in addition a full-size facsimile of Baskerville's last type specimen.

Dr Gaskell's pioneering study of social and economic change in a west Highland parish during the last century has come to be regarded as a classic of local history, a book which raises issues that are still of general and indeed of national importance. But Morvern Transformed is more than a study of history: it is (to quote Professor R. H. Campbell's new Introduction) 'a fascinating portrayal of a way of life which, only a century old, is already as different from the present as it was in its own day from the way of life another century before.'

Philip Gaskell (1926-2001) acknowledges in his Preface that 'one period in the history of one college library may not seem much of a subject for a book', but, as his 1980 study shows, Trinity College Library has a history well worth investigating. Gaskell, a former Librarian and Fellow of Trinity College, details how this library grew from small beginnings in the mid-sixteenth century into arguably the greatest of all Oxford and Cambridge college libraries. He links the growth of the library to the intellectual life of the college at that time, outlining the achievements of a number of eminent Trinity men in advancing England's spiritual, intellectual and scientific development: Cartwright, Whitgift, Coke, Bacon, Essex, George Herbert, Ray, Barrow and Newton. This is a fascinating insight into the early history and accumulation of a college library now outstandingly rich both in contents and in setting.