Baskerville Books at the Cadbury Research Library and the 'Great Baskerville Bible Crisis of 2020'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This year is the 250th anniversary of the death of John Baskerville (1707–75), a Birmingham industrialist and Enlightenment figure who made his fortune through the manufacture of fashionable japanware whilst forging a worldwide reputation as a printer. Baskerville is probably best known for the typeface which now bears his name. His typographic experiments put him ahead of his time, had an international impact and did much to enhance the printing industry of his day whilst the volumes he created in Birmingham are recognised as masterpieces of the art and craft of book making which ‘went forth to astonish all the librarians of Europe’. As well as printing in Birmingham Baskerville also became printer to the University of Cambridge, from where he issued four editions of the Book of Common Prayer and his great folio Bible which is still regarded as one of the world’s most beautifully printed books. To commemorate the anniversary of his death, this article recounts the 2020 campaign to prevent the Boulton Family Baskerville Bible from being sold at auction with its likely loss to the nation as a whole. It also reviews the Baskerville volumes housed in the Cadbury Research Library [CRL] at the University of Birmingham, one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of material from the Baskerville Press, where the Boulton Family Baskerville bible is now housed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".