Printer's Error

by Rebecca Romney

  As time marches on, many of the issues of copyright have become murkier, not clearer. Which brings us to the Internet. Oh, Mr. Dickens, let us tell you about the Internet. Content piracy may be the keystone keeping that whole damn infrastructure together. “We can note that today’s struggles,” writes one copyright historian, “are fought in terms that would be eminently comprehensible to those nineteenth-century reformers who battled over how broadly to extend rights and powers to authors.”

  On second thought, let’s not tell Mr. Dickens about the Internet.

  10

  WHEN DOVES CRY

  MOST FONT ENTHUSIASTS SHUDDER WITH horror at the thought of a certain old man strolling across the River Thames in the autumn of 1916. The dark figure labors to make his way to the railing of Hammersmith Bridge by night. His deliberate gait signals that he’s carrying a heavy burden. And from his journals, we know that he’s been suffering from severe depression. “I have been in the depths of despondency,” the seventy-six-year-old man writes, “I have no longer, as it seems to me, any essential place or function in the world. I have played, or am playing, my last cards.” That man is one of the key players of the Private Press Movement, and he is about to do something terrible.

  A witness like you might try to call out to the old man, but the septuagenarian will not listen. He struggles to pull himself up onto the railing and, with a final heave, lets his burdens go. “No!” you cry out, just before the splash—and then another splash, and another and another. Your cry trails off as several splashes dot the surface of the dark river. Now the old man doesn’t appear depressed at all. He snaps closed the box he was carrying and scampers off, giggling like a schoolboy.

  What in the name of Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg just happened?

  Was the old man just littering? In reality, he was guilty of far worse than a petty dumping violation. He has just effected the destruction of one of the world’s most beautiful fonts: the Doves Type. The shadowy figure behind this crime was none other than its devoted owner, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson.

  Today we largely take typefaces for granted. In fact, we’re kind of supposed to. Many designers argue that a font must do its “work and disappear.” Yet that’s not entirely accurate. We have countless typefaces, each telling its own story, each making us react differently, whether we realize it or not.

  The typographer Erik Spiekermann compares typefaces to footwear: Sure, they’re all accomplishing the same general purpose, but steel-toe boots send a very different message from ballet shoes. Change the typeface and you change the message.

  Some typefaces imply honesty, like Gotham. This typeface is known for its “unremarkability and inoffensability,” which the 2008 Obama campaign used for its action words such as HOPE and CHANGE. This was “a type consciously chosen to suggest forward thinking without frightening the horses.” Some typefaces have a trustworthy and authoritative air, such as Baskerville, which a recent study has indicated makes you 1.5 percent more likely to agree with a given statement.

  Today, dozens of typefaces are available on our word processors, and hundreds upon hundreds more are easily accessible for download. Until recently, though, the ultimate font of cold beauty, the Doves Type, was probably the most elusive of all. Its owner, Cobden-Sanderson, guarded it with religious zeal. Then, rather than let his type fall into commercial hands, he destroyed it. All of it.

  What led Cobden-Sanderson to hurl his legacy from a bridge is one of the more surprising stories in the history of print. As the adage goes, If you love something, drown it in the Thames. If it comes back to you, it won’t, because you drowned it in the Thames. To really understand the reasons behind Cobden-Sanderson’s destruction of the Doves Type, we have to look at his decade-long feud with ex-partner Emery Walker, and the origins of the Private Press Movement.

  BORN THOMAS Sanderson in 1840 in Northumberland, England, he spent the first forty years of his life bouncing from locations as diverse as shipyards to Cambridge University, trying his hand at myriad occupations and failing because of dissatisfaction and recurring mental breakdowns. The artistic temperament in him seemed wholly incapable of dealing with the ho-hum life of a typical Victorian Londoner.

  During a trip to Italy to recuperate from his latest downturn, he met Annie Cobden. In 1882 they married, taking each other’s last names. Annie seemed a good counterpoint to T.J., and she encouraged him to follow his dreams. This is the history of print, so his dream was, obviously, to be a bookbinder.

  To Cobden-Sanderson, bookbinding was “something which should give me means to live upon simply and in independence, and at the same time something beautiful.” There are certainly worse ways to make a living. After a decade spent mastering bookbinding, the Doves Bindery opened in March 1893, when Cobden-Sanderson was a strapping fifty-three years old. Some nineteenth-century Londoners hit their midlife crisis and run out to buy a two-horsepower convertible Victoria with drop-down front benches. Others start a bookbindery. To each his own.

  Cobden-Sanderson named his bindery after the building’s location, a pleasant lot called Doves Place. Modern collectors buy certain books for their bindings alone, and Cobden-Sanderson’s are some of the most highly sought after. They are exceptional for their aesthetic unity, the quality of their materials, and their high standard of finishing. Cobden-Sanderson’s style is so valued that you can even find known counterfeit Doves bindings floating around the market, commanding high prices themselves, forgery notwithstanding.

  Before about 1800, the components used for printing books remained surprisingly stable for three hundred years or more. Over the centuries, the book very slowly transformed into a popular commodity, rather than the expensive luxury of its earliest days. But by Cobden-Sanderson’s day, the technology of print had experienced an unprecedented rate of evolution.

  As economies and audiences shifted, consumer demand took off. Publishers needed to put out more product, and do it as fast and as cheaply as possible—which sounds like a job for your friendly neighborhood Fourdrinier paper making machine, or Koenig rotary press, or the game-changing Monotype. Every aspect of bookmaking was tinkered with to improve efficiency. The traditional world of book production—handmade papermaking, hand presses, and hand-set type—was vanishing behind a veil of steam, steel, and grinding gears.

  The aforementioned Fourdrinier machine used a moving belt and felt rollers to make paper of any width or length. Thanks to this contraption, by about 1810 machine-made paper was being regularly produced and sold. Hot on its heels, on November 28, 1814, The Times in London printed its newspaper using newly mechanized presses developed by Frederick Koenig. Instead of the up-and-down, stamplike movement of a traditional press, Koenig placed the sheet around one cylinder, which was then rolled against a second cylinder. This double-cylinder, steam-powered press represented the first major change in the fundamentals of the printing press since its invention—and more than tripled its productivity. Now you’ve created a mechanized printing assembly line. These presses worked so quickly that daily newspapers were no longer constrained to eight pages per issue, the largest practical capacity that older metal types could handle.

  Over the course of the nineteenth century, casting type jumped from around four thousand sorts (individual pieces of type) in a day by traditional hand molds to six thousand an hour on specialized typecasting machines. With the invention of the Linotype in 1884, type was cast with the press of a button, using a “hot metal” process. With this machine, printers could instantly create a “line o’ type” using a two-hundred-pound appliance that was “kind of a cross between a casting machine, a typewriter, [and] a vending machine.” Its companion, Monotype (casting single letters with the hot metal process), would soon revolutionlize the industry of typefaces.

  These new machines, among many others, dramatically accelerated the capacity for mass production in the nineteenth century. If you’re looking to create a large number of books, these machines were perfect. There are drawbacks when
it comes to mass production, however. A product can be fast, cheap, or good. It can be a combination of two, but it can’t be all three. In the nineteenth century, most publishers chose fast and cheap. The results were not what one would normally call “good.”

  Enter the rebels of the printing world. As early as 1639 there is documentary evidence of printers who worked for pleasure only—for the beauty of their craft—not for the golden god of profit. These rebels “form a distinct undercurrent” running throughout the history of print. Yet, in the Industrial Age, that curious dissent transformed into a full-fledged rebellion. Especially among the alliance of printers who saw themselves as artists rather than assistants to Linotype machines.

  Most scholars identify the start of the Private Press Movement with a lecture given at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in London on November 15, 1888. The timid speaker was Emery Walker, the . . . let’s say, Yoda of that rebel alliance. Walker was a photoengraver, successful businessman, and vocal advocate of returning printing to its high-quality roots. He had been invited to present this lecture by fellow society member T. J. Cobden-Sanderson. T.J. can be Luke Skywalker, here, if you want—the printing Force was strong with that one.

  Walker’s address had a profound impact on the world of fine printing. What may seem like a grumpy old man’s lecture about things “being better back in the day” was in fact a thrilling and inspiring call to arms. It sparked the creation of an entire community dedicated to examining every aspect of print, and finding a way to make the results as transcendent as possible. Most immediately, it inspired William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite poet and textile designer, to start the Kelmscott Press, which specialized in limited edition, hand-pressed books of exquisite beauty.

  Using a font he designed himself, and employing just two compositors and one pressman, Morris printed what has been called the first book of the Private Press Movement in 1891: his own novel The Story of the Glittering Plain. Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer, considered the masterpiece of that press, is often credited as a front-runner for the Most Beautiful Book in the World. Colin Franklin noted in 1969 that “[b]ooksellers take its current price for an index of the state of the nation,” and that assertion is still pretty accurate in some circles today.

  Meanwhile, Emery Walker presided behind the scenes, as he would for many of the most important printers of the Private Press Movement. Walker was the de facto silent partner behind Kelmscott; according to Morris’s sometime private secretary Sydney Cockerell, “no important step was taken without [Walker’s] advice and approval.” When T. J. Cobden-Sanderson ventured into printing himself, his business partner was none other than Emery Walker.

  The Private Press Movement lasted approximately from 1891 to the end of the Second World War. In all things, it was a rebellion against the impersonal mechanization of modern printing. It was a revolution of beauty. And if you were going to choose a revolution from the 1800s to throw your support behind, the one that results in artisanal books is probably better than ones that end in guillotines, political xenophobia, or ethnic cleansing.

  The inspiration for this printing revolution was the books of Gutenberg’s day, which were, in comparison to industrial age volumes, gorgeously fabricated and meticulously designed, from the viscous black ink and the carefully sculpted type to the hand-sewn bindings. Even in Gutenberg’s day, though, machines were used to produce commodities on a mass scale. Herein lies the irony. Machines can’t be all bad: the printing press itself is a machine. So how much mechanization is too much mechanization? The rebels who ran private presses rarely agreed among themselves on any particular detail.

  One characteristic starkly separates fine press printing from mainstream printing: its ultimate goal. Whereas big publishers were out for profit, fine presses cared about making high-quality books—profits and nice clothing and warm houses and food be damned. The money made by presses such as the Doves Press barely factored into anyone’s considerations because they cared about only the elegance of the final product. On this point both Walker and Cobden-Sanderson were firmly in agreement. As a result, these presses created some of the most stunning books the world has ever seen, but it also made running a business difficult. Always short on cash, the Doves Press closed five years before Cobden-Sanderson’s death. Its parts were sold off for just eighty-seven pounds—about 18 percent of its total start-up cost.

  Even if Cobden-Sanderson could have foreseen the meager finances coming to him, he wouldn’t have cared—at all. His wife, Annie, might have cared a little because she funded the Doves Press with her inheritance, but Cobden-Sanderson was a rebel with a cause. And that cause was gorgeous books. Or, as he described it, “The Book Beautiful.”

  Like other pieces of art that are sold as commodities, over the centuries books have been balanced precariously between “sacred vessels of Western culture” and “show me the money!” Both philosophically and monetarily, books are most often valued for what’s written inside them. Still, we have a natural urge to make something physically beautiful in order to demonstrate its value to us. Some of us take that a bit further than others. For Cobden-Sanderson, money was entirely beside the point. Books themselves were divine: “This is the supreme Book Beautiful . . . a dream, a symbol of the infinitely beautiful in which all things of beauty rest, and into which all things of beauty do ultimately merge.”

  Good heavens, where can someone buy a piece of this sublime portable universe, marching ceaselessly through time and space? Answer: at the Doves Press sometime in the slim sixteen-year window of its operation. In October 1902 the Doves Press completed its original printing of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was called by the famed English bibliographer A. W. Pollard “the finest edition . . . ever printed, or ever likely to be . . . I know no more perfect book in Roman type.” He’s really not exaggerating. You can expect to pay a few thousand dollars to obtain one today.

  THE DOVES PRESS BIBLE, 1903–1905. Image courtesy Heritage Auctions.

  Cobden-Sanderson next tackled the Bible. “In the beginning God created Life,” he explained. “And it is this Life, this Life of each and of all of us, which in the language of the Press, we must COMPOSE.” Between 1902–05, the Doves Press composed life.

  The clear, stark beauty of this page feels like a marble statue translated from stone into paper. In person, it is breathtaking. Anyone talking around you suddenly sounds like the adults in Peanuts cartoons, a dull, irritating wah-wah-wah next to the presence of the book in your hands.

  This lofty rhetoric may seem a bit hyperbolic to people who view books as . . . just books. To the untrained eye, though, the simplicity is deceiving: “[The] masterly calligraphic initials, like the unforgettable opening of Genesis . . . were a perfect example of how to marry calligraphy and typography, and [the] setting was full of those almost invisible refinements that only another printer can recognize.”

  To Cobden-Sanderson and the revolutionaries of the Private Press Movement, books were the summit of artistic expression. What value had money when compared to the realization of humanity’s true potential? It was dross, we tell you, shiny, metal dross. At least, that’s how Cobden-Sanderson felt about it. His business partner had a more complex view.

  Emery Walker may have been the Yoda whose speech sparked the Private Press Movement, but he was still a competent businessman. Two men can run a print business together, sure, but it’s a bit harder if one is an artist with his head in the clouds and the other is a leader with a plan. Initially, it seemed that Cobden-Sanderson and Walker shared the same philosophy. For example, they both formally agreed to be paid in books. “[Cobden-Sanderson] and Emery Walker were simply to share the work, and, in return, each of them would receive a copy on vellum, and a dozen copies on paper, of the books they printed. If there were any profits after expenses, these would be divided equally.” Profits were like getting to the end of a bag of Halloween candy. The valuable stuff has already been divided—vellum copies of Paradise Lost might be the full-size Sni
ckers bars here—and all that’s left are those awful rainbow-colored Tootsie Rolls and bite-size Milky Ways. Fine, take half of those. No one wanted them, anyway.

  Both Walker and Cobden-Sanderson believed in producing beautiful books before profit. So far, so good. But pretty soon their differing philosophies rose to the surface. In particular, Walker believed he was an equal partner in the Doves Press. Cobden-Sanderson believed he was an idiot for thinking that.

  Emery Walker may have brought some much-needed business savvy to the operation (along with a list of potential subscribers from the neighboring Kelmscott Press), but Annie had paid for everything, and Cobden-Sanderson was doing most of the work. The most serious dispute between the partners wasn’t over profits. It was the fight on principle for ownership of the most important product to come out of their joint venture: the elegant, pristine, chills-inducing Doves Type.

  BESIDES THE influence of technical designers and punch cutters, the Doves Type is a combination of two different typefaces dating back to fifteenth-century Italy, as well as Cobden-Sanderson’s personal touch to the numerals. The Doves is a mirror of its unique time and place. While it reflects the reverence that printers such as Walker and Cobden-Sanderson paid to the pioneers of print in the fifteenth century, details have been subtly changed to make it as refined as possible to the early twentieth-century eye. It is the Private Press Movement in a nutshell.

  What was true of the Doves Type is true of typefaces from any age: they are reflections of their culture. Even before print, the script we call Gothic developed in the Late Middle Ages as a way for scribes to write faster when the rise of universities increased the demand for books. In a time before paper came into common use, this script also produced writing in a more compressed form, to save on expensive parchment. In fact, it was originally called textura because the compressed style gave it a woven appearance. Gutenberg’s typeface in the first printed Bible was inspired by textura scripts.