I missed this wonderful story about the infamous lost typeface of English Arts and Crafts publisher Doves Press — unceremoniously “bequeathed” to the Thames by one of the co-founders of the press — in The Economist last month:
Between August 1916 and January 1917 Cobden-Sanderson, a printer and bookbinder, dropped more than a tonne of metal printing type from the west side of the bridge. He made around 170 trips in all from his bindery beside the pub, a distance of about half a mile, and always after dusk. At the start he hurled whole pages of type into the river; later he threw it like bird seed from his pockets. Then he found a small wooden box with a sliding lid, for which he made a handle out of tape—perfect for sprinkling the pieces into the water, and not too suspicious to bystanders.
Those tiny metal slugs belonged to a font of type used exclusively by the Doves Press, a printer of fine books that Cobden-Sanderson had co-founded 16 years earlier. The type was not his to destroy, so he concealed his trips from his friends and family and dropped his packages only when passing traffic would drown out the splash. There were slip-ups, all the same. One evening he nearly struck a boatman, whose vessel shot out unexpectedly from under the bridge. Another night he threw two cases of type short of the water. They landed on the pier below, out of reach but in plain sight. After sleepless nights he determined to retrieve them by boat, but they eventually washed away. After that he was more careful.
Now, almost 100 years after the original metal type was lost, Doves has been revived as a digital typeface:
For three years [Richard Green] has been crafting a digital reproduction of the famous face—the first fully usable Doves font since the original metal pieces were swallowed by the Thames. In search of perfect curves and precise serifs, he reckons he has redrawn it at least 120 times. “I’m not really sure why I started. In the end it took over my life.”
Intrepid fans have occasionally tried to recover pieces of the type from the river, but no one has ever found any, so Mr Green had to beg and borrow Doves books as a reference. That sounds simple—yet the uneven printing that letterpress-lovers cherish made tracing the type impossible. Once ink hits paper, no single letter is reproduced identically. Guessing the shape of the metal that made the marks takes time and patience. Guess wrong, and the error is imperceptible at first; but lined up in text the letter looks awkward, the typeface distracting.
That painstaking process is similar to the technique Cobden-Sanderson and Walker used to create the Doves type, itself a confection of two earlier designs. Doves owes most to the type of Nicholas Jenson, a Venetian printer from the 15th century whose clear and elegant texts shunned the gothic blackletter favoured by print’s early pioneers. A few letters were added, and others redrawn. The arrow-straight descender of its lower case ‘y’ divides critics; purists lament the thick crossbar of the upper case ‘H’. Most people neither notice nor care. “No more graceful Roman letter has ever been cut and cast,” opined A.W. Pollard, a contemporary critic, in the Times. Simon Garfield, a modern writer, celebrates its rickety form, which looks “as if someone had broken into the press after hours and banged into the compositor’s plates.”
You can read more about the history of Doves and the digital revival at Typespec.
And apparently a small amount of the original metal type was recently salvaged from the Thames too. Amazing.
