Libre Baskerville

Try Libre Baskerville

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Libre Baskerville Regular Italic
• Medium 500Libre Baskerville Medium Medium Italic
• SemiBold 600Libre Baskerville SemiBold SemiBold Italic
• Bold 700Libre Baskerville Bold Bold Italic

Libre Baskerville is a variable font: the download holds the whole weight range in one file per style, and the named weights above are positions on that range.

About Libre Baskerville

Libre Baskerville is a serif typeface drawn for body text on the web, with around 16px as its intended size. According to the official notes it follows the Baskerville issued by American Type Founders in 1941, but raises the x-height, opens the counters and reduces the contrast so the letters hold up on screens. In the specimen the hairlines still read clearly thinner than the stems, the serifs are bracketed, the capital Q has a sweeping tail and the J drops below the baseline. The family is a variable font with one axis, weight, running from 400 to 700; Regular, Medium, SemiBold and Bold are named and each has an italic, which makes eight styles. The fonts hold 864 glyphs and cover the Latin and Latin Extended character sets. Impallari Type publishes the family under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where Libre Baskerville works

Article and blog body text

The raised x-height and open counters were chosen for paragraphs at about 16px, the size most web body copy is set in.

Long-form reading pages

Regular with its italic handles running text and emphasis, and Bold marks subheads without leaving the family.

Bookish headings

At large sizes the thin hairlines, bracketed serifs and tailed Q give chapter titles and mastheads a printed-book look.

Quotations and pull quotes

Every weight between 400 and 700 has an italic, so a quoted passage can be set in SemiBold Italic as easily as in plain Italic.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian

Character sets found in the files: latin, latin-ext. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Libre Baskerville

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Libre Baskerville on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Libre Baskerville";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/LibreBaskerville-Italic-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400 700;
  font-style: italic;
  font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Libre Baskerville";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/LibreBaskerville-VariableFont_wght.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400 700;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Libre Baskerville", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Libre Baskerville with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Libre+Baskerville:ital,wght@0,400..700;1,400..700&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Weight stops at Bold

The weight axis runs from 400 to 700. There is no light cut and nothing heavier than Bold.

Latin scripts only

The fonts cover Latin and Latin Extended. Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese are not included.

Two variable files

The download holds one variable file for the upright styles and one for the italics.

FAQs

Collections with Libre Baskerville

• Fonts for résumés and CVs

  Readable open-license serif and sans-serif families for a one- or two-page CV, with the weights and italics a document needs.

• Serif fonts for long reading on screens

  Text serifs drawn for screens or for long reading: large x-heights, moderate contrast and real italics for articles, blogs and documentation.

• Old-style and revival serif fonts for books

  Digital revivals of Renaissance, baroque and later book types, and new designs in the old-style tradition, most with italics, for novels, essays and fine printing.

• Fonts that support Turkish

  Open-license families that contain every letter of the Turkish alphabet, including dotted and dotless i, across text, display and script styles.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All serif fonts