The Foulis Press ‘Pope’, 1786

The brothers Robert and Andrew Foulis, and later Robert’s son Andrew, were printer-publishers in the great tradition of Aldus and Estienne. Appointed printers to the University of Glasgow in 1743, they owe their place as Scotland’s greatest printers equally to their scholarship and their technical ability. ‘A “Foulis edition” of the best sort’, writes Updike, ‘is Andrew Foulis’s Poetical Works of Alexander Pope (1785), in three folio volumes. The effect of the pages of the poems is very noble and most readable, owing to the large size of fine type in which the text is set’ . The type, a transitional letter, was cut by Alexander Wilson of St. Andrew’s.

Actual page size – 35cm x 22cm, printed on both sides. Mounted on grey board.

Original Leaf from a Famous European Book, each work with one-page letterpress index, the idea is that each leaf is mounted and subsequently framed to provide a unique wall decoration.

This was an old fund-raising exercise perfected by the Folio Society

 The Foulis Brothers and Alexander Wilson

The Scottish brothers Robert and Andrew Foulis established their book selling and publishing business in Glasgow in 1741. At first, they had to farm out most of their titles to other printers, but by 1742 they acquired their own press, and the following year they became the official printers for the University of Glasgow. They became so famous for the beauty and clarity of their over 550 editions that they were referred to as “the Elzevirs of Britain.”

The beauty came from the Foulis’ owns skills and aesthetic choices as printers, but the clarity can be attributed to the bold evenness of their typefaces, designed and produced by the accomplished Scottish type designer and punch cutter (among other things) Alexander Wilson, who had established his foundry business in 1742.

Wilson’s designs are distinct from those of his contemporary, John Baskerville, and would later be grouped with a class of typefaces known as Scotch Roman. In 1743, the Foulis Brothers produced the first Greek book printed in Glasgow using Wilson’s design, which would attain renown for its later use in the Foulis’ 1756-1758 edition of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

Wilson’s early typefaces (shown here in a 1750 edition of More’s Utopia, and a 1759 edition of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura) appear to owe their designs to Dutch models, while his Double Pica, first used in 1768 for the Foulis’ quarto edition of Gray’s Poems clearly shows Baskerville’s influence . In this latter volume, the Foulis Brothers print an appreciation, in third person, for Wilson’s design:

This is the first work in the Roman character which they [the printers] have printed with so large a type; and they are obliged to Doctor Wilson for preparing so expeditiously, and with so much attention, characters of so beautiful a form.

Today, Wilson’s designs live on in modern revisions, such as David Quay’s and Freda Sack’s Foundry Wilson originally designed in 1993 as a commission for the International Typeface Corporation (ITC); Foulis Greek, part of the Junicode family of fonts designed by Peter S. Baker; and Wilson Greek designed in 1995 by the incomparable Matthew Carter.

Baskerville Greek

John Baskerville is remembered for his very distinctive Roman font, still in use in many iterations today. He is less well-known for his Greek type which he designed for Oxford University in 1761, yet its influence is seen in many Greek fonts today.

For their edition of a Greek New Testament, Oxford desired a better Greek type than was available at the time, and so contracted with Baskerville for a new design. Baskerville’s relationship to the type ended once it was delivered. The text was printed by Oxford in 1763 without Baskerville ever visiting the University, or even being consulted. The types were met with immediate criticism, being called “execrable,” “stiff and cramped,” and “not good ones.” To a modern eye, the type is very readable, but for Baskerville’s contemporaries it broke with conventions of Greek type design that still followed the highly cursive forms established by such typographers as Francesco Griffo and Claude Garamond in the early 16th century.

Baskerville’s Oxford Greek was not used again in his lifetime but would later serve as a model for Greek type designs into our own day.

The Foulis Press collection was begun in 1990 with the acquisition of approximately 330 titles, almost half the titles known to be published by Robert and Andrew Foulis over the span of thirty-five years. Subsequently, the Library has added titles on a selective basis and the collection has grown to about 375 titles.

Robert and Andrew Foulis were booksellers and printers who issued more than 600 titles in Glasgow from 1740 to 1776. The press was continued in a modest form by Andrew Foulis the younger until 1806. The two brothers were particularly proud of their editions of Greek and Latin authors such as Homer, Pindar, Cicero, Herodotus, and Aristotle. Their books were noted for quality, and many were attractively bound. Although they were mostly interested in classical authors, Robert and Andrew also produced English editions with Chaucer, Milton, Dryden, Shakespeare, and Pope. As well, there are a few French and Italian authors such as Boccacio represented in their catalogues.

English is the predominate language; however, many classical authors were reprinted in Greek and Latin.

Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) was a poet and satirist of the Augustan period and one of its greatest artistic exponents. Considered the foremost English poet of the early 18th century and a master of the heroic couplet, he is best known for satirical and discursive poetry, including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism, and for his translation of Homer. After Shakespeare, he is the second-most quoted author in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, some of his verses having entered common parlance (e.g. “damning with faint praise” or “to err is human; to forgive, divine”).