[18] R. Straus and R. K. Dent, _John Baskerville_, Cambridge, 1907. On page 19 the authors include a letter to Baskerville from Benjamin Franklin, written in 1760 in a jocular tone, which notes that he overheard a friend saying that Baskerville's types would be "the means of blinding all the Readers in the Nation owing to the thin and narrow strokes of the letters." About 1777 the French became acquainted with wove paper, which Franklin brought to Paris for exhibition. In 1779, according to Hunter,[19] M. Didot the famous printer, "having seen the _papier vélin_ that Baskerville used, addressed a letter to M. Johannot of Annonay, a skilled papermaker, asking him to endeavour to duplicate the smooth and even surface of this new paper. Johannot was successful in his experiments, and for his work in this field he was in 1781 awarded a gold medal by Louis XVI." [19] Hunter, _op. cit._ (footnote 15), p. 219. [Illustration: Figure 7.--Wood Engraving by Thomas Bewick, "The Man and the Flea," for _Fables, by the late Mr. Gay_, 1779. (Actual size.) Note how the closely worked lines of the sky and water have blurred in printing on laid paper. The pale vertical streak is caused by the laid mould.] Wove paper was so slow to come into use that Jenkins gives the date 1788 for its first appearance in book printing.[20] While he missed a few examples, notably by Baskerville, it is certain that few books with wove paper were published before 1790. But after that date its manufacture increased with such rapidity that by 1805 it had supplanted laid paper for many printing purposes. The reasons for this gap between the introduction and the acceptance of the new paper are not clear; the inertia of tradition as well as the probable higher cost no doubt played a part, and we may assume that early wove paper had imperfections and other drawbacks serious enough to cause printers to prefer the older material. Bewick's early work was printed on laid paper. Up to 1784 he had worked in a desultory fashion on wood, much of his time being occupied with seal cutting because there was still no real demand for wood engraving. In Gay's _Fables_, published in 1779, the cuts printed so poorly on the laid paper (see fig. 7) that Dobson[21] was moved to say: Generally speaking, the printing of all these cuts, even in the earlier editions (and it is absolutely useless to consult any others), is weak and unskillful. The fine work of the backgrounds is seldom made out, and the whole impression is blurred and unequal. [Illustration: Figure 8.--"The Spanish Pointer", illustration (actual size) by Thomas Bewick, from _A general history of quadrupeds_, 1790, in the collections of the Library of Congress.] [20] Rhys Jenkins, "Early papermaking in England, 1495-1788," _Library Association Record_, London, 1900-1902, vol. 2, nos. 9 and 11; vol. 3, no. 5; vol. 4, nos. 3 and 4. [21] Dobson, _op. cit._ (footnote 8), p. 56.