#doves type

The Doves Type legend is one of the most enduring in typographic history and probably the most infamous. It’s the story of a typeface and a bitter feud between the two partners of Hammersmith’s celebrated Doves Press, Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker, leading to the protracted disposal of their unique metal type into London’s River Thames. Starting in 1913 with the initial dumping of the punches and matrices, by the end of January 1917 an increasingly frail Cobden-Sanderson had made hundreds of clandestine trips under cover of darkness to Hammersmith Bridge and systematically thrown 12lb parcels of metal type into the murky depths below. As one person so aptly commented on Twitter recently, this notorious tale bears all the hallmarks of a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

The original Doves Type was crafted by master punchcutter Edward Prince, based on drawings produced by Percy Tiffin of Nicolas Jenson’s pioneering 15th-century Venetian type. William Morris, founder of the Kelmscott Press, had actually developed his own ‘Golden’ type some years before The Doves Press came into being but Doves is held by experts as being more faithful to the original Venetian letterforms.

The Doves Type was commissioned in 1899 and created solely by Prince in 16 pt; it was used in all of the press’s publications including their iconic edition of the King James Bible. Each Doves Press book was beautifully bound and, notes Green, noticeably “stripped of decorative borders and illustration, the elegantly clear & legible type acting alone as visual siren-song.”

By 1908, despite successful Milton prints and the aforementioned Bible, the Press was in dire financial difficulty. Subscribers began melting away after Walker had effectively left in 1906 as the bitter & acrimonious dispute took hold between the partners. On finally dissolving their partnership in 1909, Cobden-Sanderson began attempts to wriggle out of an earlier promise that, should the partnership cease, Walker would receive a fount of type ‘for his own use’. Walker retaliated, issuing a writ insisting that the Press shut down completely and he receive 50% of remaining assets. In 1909, the Press’s only valuable asset was the type.

A compromise was reached, brokered by their exasperated friend Sir Sydney Cockerell, which allowed Cobden-Sanderson uncontrolled use of the type for as long as he lived, at which time it would pass to Emery Walker, if he did not die first.

The thought of ‘his’ typeface being used by anyone else, and in a manner beyond his control, prompted Cobden-Sanderson’s now infamous course of action. Only the Doves Press, run exclusively by him, could be bestowed the honour of printing his type. And so the mission to destroy it, beginning with the punches and matrices on Good Friday 1913, began. On an almost nightly basis from August 1916 the ailing septuagenarian dumped the type into the Thames, wrapped in paper parcels and tied with string; “bequeathed to the river” as he put it in his personal diary. Every piece of this beautiful typeface, more than a ton of metal, was destroyed in a prolonged ritual sacrifice.

—Raised from the dead: The Doves Type story, 2013

After working on a revised digital facsimile Robert Green decided that he would try and find some of the original metal type. Using the sources available, including Cobden-Sanderson's published journals, Mr Green worked out where he thought the type was thrown from the bridge into the Thames.

At low tide, and with a mudlarkers licence, he scoured the Thames foreshore and found three pieces of the original type.

Due to the dangerous nature of the Thames currents and tides a team of professional divers from the Port of London Authority then spent two days looking for more type and a total of 150 pieces were recovered.

Remnants of a Legendary Typeface Have Been Rescued From the Thames River

Doves Type was thrown into the water a century ago, following a dispute between its creators.

The depths of the river Thames in London hold many unexpected stories, gleaned from the recovery of prehistoric tools, Roman pottery, medieval jewelry, and much more besides. Yet the tale of the lost (and since recovered) Doves typeface is surely one of the most peculiar.

A little over a century ago, the printer T.J. Cobden-Sanderson took it upon himself to surreptitiously dump every piece of this carefully honed metal letterpress type into the river. It was an act of retribution against his business partner, Emery Walker, whom he believed was attempting to swindle him.

The pair had conceived this idiosyncratic Arts and Crafts typeface when they founded the Doves Press in the London’s Hammersmith neighborhood, in 1900. They worked with draftsman Percy Tiffin and master punch-cutter Edward Prince to faithfully recall the Renaissance clarity of 15th-century Venetian fonts, designed by the revolutionary master typographer Nicolas Jensen.

With its extra-wide capital letters, diamond shaped punctuation and unique off-kilter dots on the letter “i,” Doves Type became the press’s hallmark, surpassing fussier typographic attempts by their friend and sometime collaborator, William Morris.

The letterforms only existed as a unique 16pt edition, meaning that when Cobden-Sanderson decided to “bequeath” every single piece of molded lead to the Thames, he effectively destroyed any prospect of the typeface ever being printed again. That might well have been the case, were it not for several individuals and a particularly tenacious graphic designer.

Robert Green first became fascinated with Doves Type in the mid-2000s, scouring printed editions and online facsimiles, to try and faithfully redraw and digitize every line. In 2013, he released the first downloadable version on typespec, but remained dissatisfied. In October 2014, he decided to take to the river to see if he could find any of the original pieces.

Using historical accounts and Cobden-Sanderson’s diaries, he pinpointed the exact spot where the printer had offloaded his wares, from a shadowy spot on Hammersmith bridge. “I’d only been down there 20 minutes and I found three pieces,” he said. “So, I got in touch with the Port of London Authority and they came down to search in a meticulous spiral.” The team of scuba divers used the rather low-tech tools of a bucket and a sieve to sift through the riverbed.

Green managed to recover a total of 151 sorts (the name for individual pieces of type) out of a possible 500,000. “It’s a tiny fraction, but when I was down by the river on my own, for one second it all felt very cosmic,” he said. “It was like Cobden-Sanderson had dropped the type from the bridge and straight into my hands. Time just collapsed.”

The finds have enabled him to further develop his digitized version and has also connected him with official mudlarks (people who search riverbanks for lost treasures, with special permits issued) who have uncovered even more of the type.

Jason Sandy, an architect, author and member of the Society of Thames Mudlarks, found 12 pieces, which he has donated to Emery Walker’s House at 7 Hammersmith Terrace. This private museum was once home to both business partners, and retains its stunning domestic Arts and Crafts interior.

Much like Green, Sandy was captivated by the Doves Type story, and mounted an exhibition at the house that displays hundreds of these salvaged pieces, including those discovered by Green, as well as mudlarks Lucasz Orlinski and Angus McArthur. The show was supplemented by a whole host of Sandy’s other finds, including jewelry and tools. An extant copy of the Doves English Bible is also on display.

“It is not that unusual to find pieces of type in the river,” Sandy said. “Particularly around Fleet Street, where newspaper typesetters would throw pieces in the water when they couldn’t be bothered to put them back in their cases. But this is a legendary story and we mudlarks love a good challenge.” The community is naturally secretive about exactly where and how things are found. For example, Orlinski has worked under the cover of night with a head torch, to search for treasures at his own mysterious spot on the riverbank.

For Sandy, the thrill comes from the discovery of both rare and everyday artifacts, which can lead to an entirely new line of inquiry: “The Thames is very democratic. It gives you a clear picture of what people have been wearing or using over thousands of years. And it’s not carefully curated by a museum. The river gives up these objects randomly, and you experience these amazing stories of ordinary Londoners. It creates a very tangible connection to the past. Every object leads you down a rabbit hole.”

By Holly Black.

In 1916, after falling out with his business partner, the creator of the font ‘Doves Type’ threw all existing Doves type blocks into the Thames. In 2014, the font was resurrected after mudlarkers retrieved the blocks.

The Doves Type was a typeface created by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker of The Doves Press, founded in 1900. When the partnership was eventually dissolved in 1909 after a bitter dispute, ownership of the Dove Type was appointed to Cobden-Sanderson, whereupon his death the ownership would pass to Walker.

Rather than let this happen, Cobden-Smith began to dispose of the type matrices into the River Thames off Hammersmith Bridge. Cobden-Sanderson wrote in his personal journals that he "bequeathed to the river" the type itself. Beginning in 1916, under the cloak of midnight, Cobden-Sanderson began the slow task of disposing of Doves into the river. He said that he completed the task in January 1917 after 170 trips in total to the bridge.

"The thought of ‘his’ typeface being used by anyone else, and in a manner beyond his control, prompted Cobden-Sanderson’s now infamous course of action. Only the Doves Press, run exclusively by him, could be bestowed the honour of printing his type. And so the mission to destroy it, beginning with the punches and matrices on Good Friday 1913, began. On an almost nightly basis from August 1916 the ailing septuagenarian dumped the type into the Thames, wrapped in paper parcels and tied with string; “bequeathed to the river” as he put it in his personal diary. Every piece of this beautiful typeface, more than a ton of metal, was destroyed in a prolonged ritual sacrifice.”

Given Cobden-Sanderson’s motive for trying to destroy the font, I’m just going to put this idea out to the universe and see if Chuck Tingle ever uses it...

Typography Tuesday: Sir Emery Walker

It may be Election Day, but it’s still also Typography Tuesday. 

William Morris’s founding of the Kelmscott Press in 1891 is usually identified as the origin of the contemporary fine-press movement. While this may be true, it is also true that Emery Walker’s iconic lecture on typography and letterpress printing at the 1888 Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was the spark that ignited the movement. Without it, Morris may never have uttered his famous remark, “Let’s make a new fount of type!” -- an utterance that led the founding of his press.

Morris’s influence cannot be overstated, but he died in 1896, while Walker, knighted for his many contributions to typography, engraving, printing, and the Arts and Crafts movement, died in 1933, leaving a legacy that is long and deep. Walker was strongly instrumental in the development of Morris’s three typefaces for Kelmscott; the ill-fated Doves type, lost for almost 100 years; the typefaces used by C. H. St. John Hornby’s Ashendene Press; and the types used at Count Harry Kessler’s German print shop, the Cranach Press.

This holiday keepsake printed in 1988 in an edition of 150 copies for The Typophiles (an organization founded in the early 20th century to encourage the appreciation of fine typography and bookmaking) for the centenary of Walker’s formative Arts and Crafts lecture and a talk given by Herbert H Johnson on Walker’s achievements, presents specimens of each of the typefaces Walker was involved in designing.  

Hayley Campbell on the history of Doves Type, the lead type from London's Hammersmith Press that was thrown into the Thames in the early 1900s:

In 1917, a note appeared in The Times from Cobden-Sanderson announcing the end of the Doves Press, but it was written in such florid language that no one could tell if he was being metaphorical when he said he “bequeathed” the type to the Thames.

He wasn’t. He had literally chucked it into the river.

In the final months of 1916, Cobden-Sanderson threw the punches and the matrices — the templates needed to cast type — into the water beneath Hammersmith Bridge, and followed them with every piece of Doves Type that existed.

It's a great story — famous within graphic design and typography circles — but I'm actually really interested in that this is showing up on BuzzFeed! I've never seen Buzzfeed to a do a story on design history and it's great to see Campbell not only tell a great historical story, but also tie into some deep writing on typography. She talks to Robert Green, the British designer who is digitizing Doves (“People think that type just rains down from heaven unbidden, it just comes through the internet,” he says, and then, his face incredulous: “What do you mean you design type? Somebody draws that?”), and Tobias Frere-Jones:

Typographer Tobias Frere-Jones says that to devote your life to type, more than anything else you need to be very, very patient. For him, this career was the rare intersection of two others he couldn’t choose between: writing and painting, equal parts logical and emotional. He says that everyone is affected by type, even if they’re not consciously aware of it. He tells me over email that the shapes and rhythm of a typeface create a personality that can underscore (or undermine) the text it carries. “It’s a lot like what costume designers do in films, dressing the characters in ways that quietly tell us about their personality.”