We call typefaces like these “Gothic” because of the cultural shift that took place in the Renaissance. Gothic was “a term of derisive abuse which the Italian humanists applied to the traditional script of their contemporaries . . . [I]t was only meant to signify the classicist’s contempt for the barbarism of those who neglect to follow the Roman models as the Goths and Vandals did.” In other words, our modern name for this font family is a Renaissance-era insult aimed at the Middle Ages.
No matter the time or culture, our fonts change with us. In order to define themselves against the rest of the world, for example, early twentieth-century German patriots advocated the use of Gothic fonts. These fonts were deeply tied to major moments in the German literary tradition, such as Martin Luther’s 1523 translation of the Bible. Maybe you can guess where this is going. With the Nazi Party’s rise to power, Gothic fonts became part of the Propagandamaschine. Here’s a real slogan from the time: “Feel German, think German, speak German, be German, even in your script.”
In 1941, however, German script suddenly changed. Gothic type was labeled Jewish. “The type [was] being newly associated with the documents of Jewish bankers and the Jewish owners of printing presses.” That may have been true, but there were other causes as well. According to Erik Spiekermann, there was actually a shortage of fonts in Gothic typefaces; moreover, conquered territories were having trouble reading it. In other words, Gothic became too impractical. What’s the point in conquering a nation if the people can’t read all the horribly racist posters you keep putting up? The dominance of Roman typefaces in German books today is partially thanks to the lack of printing supplies in the Nazi Party.
The typefaces of the Private Press Movement reflected the concerns and the culture of the period. William Morris’s work at the Kelmscott Press, which many people write off as simply too much, expresses a powerful printing philosophy. The pages are densely pressed, covered with elaborate woodcuts and a typeface almost too pretty to read comfortably. One fellow printer calls them “full of wine.” This style was meant to be beautiful, yes, but it was also meant to create an “alienation effect,” that is, an extreme statement meant to force a reaction. Morris wasn’t simply suggesting his opinion; he was screaming it. It was this barbaric yawp that led the rebellion like a battle cry.
The moment of conception for the Doves Type probably occurred at a Sotheby’s auction in December 1898. About a year and a half before, William Morris had died. By the following spring, his Kelmscott Press had closed, and the inventory was slotted to be sold off. In his journal from December 11, Cobden-Sanderson wrote about the need to create a typeface for “the Book Beautiful.” Lucky for him, much of the movement’s original inspiration was contained in Morris’s collection of fifteenth-century books, which had just gone up for auction.
Two books in particular would have been of supreme interest to Cobden-Sanderson. The first was a copy of Historia Naturalis by the ancient Roman author Pliny the Elder, printed in Venice in 1476 by Nicolas Jenson. Jenson had created a Roman font for this book that has been described as “absolutely perfect,” and was imitated for the next four hundred years. William Morris used Jenson’s Historia Naturalis to create his first Private Press font, which he named the Golden Type. (Morris liberally altered Jenson’s typeface, to make it thicker and more gothic. Cobden-Sanderson wanted a return to the thinner, cleaner look of the original.) From Historia Naturalis, the capital letters of the Doves typeface were formed.
The lowercase letters also came from a fifteenth-century Venetian printer, one Jacobus Rubeus, who printed Historia del popolo fiorentino in 1476. There is some debate as to how much access Cobden-Sanderson had to the Jenson and Rubeus books while the Doves Type was being conceived, but this is where Emery Walker comes in. Walker had helped William Morris create his Golden typeface ten years earlier, by photographing and enlarging both historiae. Walker still owned those negatives.
One of Walker’s photoengraving employees, Percy Tiffin, used this material to redraw a set of letters and numerals that would become the artistic model for the Doves Type. But Edward Prince, the punchcutter, had to carve them in 3D. This was no easy task. A reader might be wondering, how hard could it be to re-create those typefaces? The letters were there on the page in front of them. Just, you know, sculpt them again. A book’s physical printing has an impact on how the typeface turns out, though. For example, how hard a letter is pressed into the page, or how much ink it has taken, changes the appearance of the type. Walker wrote that “nearly all of Jenson’s [letters were] . . . over-inked and gave an imperfect view of the type.” Prince had to “extract” their “true shapes” by hand from the various samples he was given.
Since the Latin alphabet doesn’t have a J, U, W, or its lowercase equivalent, those letters also had to be added. (Fun fact: Latin did have a w sound, but it was attached to the letter v. So that famous phrase attributed to Julius Caesar, “Veni, vidi, vici,” (“I came; I saw; I conquered”) would have been pronounced, “Weni, widi, wiki”—which sounds like something a Roman toddler might say after subduing the Pontic Empire under his bed.)
Cobden-Sanderson took issue with the numerals that Tiffin created for the Doves Type, so he consulted an acquaintance at the British Museum and finally approved a set that looks like the room numbers hanging in every classy hotel built between 1910 and 1940.
NUMBERS PRINTED IN THE DOVES PRESS CATALOGUE RAISONNé, 1914. From authors’ personal collection.
The Doves Type can’t adequately be called the creation of any one person. Two fifteenth-century printers provided the design of the letters; Walker owned the negatives and made revisions; Tiffin redrew the letters; Cobden-Sanderson directed much of the operation and tinkered with the numerals; punch cutter Edward Prince transformed those model drawings into actual metal characters that could be sunk into matrices and cast into type.
One of the terms of Walker and Cobden-Sanderson’s printing venture was that each partner should receive a font of Doves Type for his own use. By 1906, however, Cobden-Sanderson wasn’t in much of a sharing mood. After finishing the print run on the Bible, he wanted Walker out, and offered him a sum of money to forfeit all claims to the Doves Type.
More than a few red flags had popped up before this, signaling that their partnership wasn’t going so well:
• Cobden-Sanderson was nearly incapable of holding down a typical nineteenth-century job. Walker ran a thriving photoengraving firm.
• Cobden-Sanderson was a perfectionist with an artist’s temperament. Walker was a level-headed businessman.
• Cobden-Sanderson was “done to death’s door” by the amount of time he spent at the Doves Press. Walker checked in once a day, more interested in light management, without handling any actual presswork.
In a long letter written to Walker in 1902 (but never sent), Cobden-Sanderson outlined his grievances. When they started the press, they’d agreed to split the labor. Cobden-Sanderson would read the proofs, and Walker would oversee technical operations. It seems Walker wasn’t living up to his end of the bargain. To make matters worse, he was critical of typographical errors and design choices that were supposed to fall under Cobden-Sanderson’s jurisdiction.
Writing about their past projects, Cobden-Sanderson complained, “You objected to the spelling [in Paradise Lost], and you objected to the capitals in the text . . . to my arrangement of ‘In the Beginning’ and to the long initial I, and said ‘It will never do,’ you objected to the position of the title of the First Book of Genesis on the left hand page, and said it was ‘hateful.’”
We’re picking up a lot of angst here. By August 1902, Cobden-Sanderson wanted to dissolve the partnership completely. Since printing for the Doves Bible had just begun, he decided to bide his time. Three and a half years later, with the Bible behind them and his son, Dickie, working alongside him at the press, Cobden-Sanderson formally tried to buy out Walker’s claims to the Doves Type. Walker was less than cooperative.
I
t would appear that, for sole ownership of the type, Cobden-Sanderson upped his original offer from one hundred to three hundred pounds. It would also appear that Walker was like, uh . . . no. Whatever amount Walker countered with was apparently too rich for Cobden-Sanderson, and the negotiations broke down for the next couple of months.
The following February, a mediation of sorts was reached between the two partners—or, at least, that was Cobden-Sanderson’s impression. A mutual acquaintance drew up an arrangement that would allow for the end of the partnership in November 1908, and a payment of one hundred pounds to go toward the casting of a new font of Doves Type, if Walker so desired. He would later deny that he agreed to any of this. Which would have made any chitchat around the espresso machine particularly awkward over the next two and a half years, had Walker remained involved in the daily operations.
By this time, Cobden-Sanderson was in his late sixties. The sun rose and set on one thing in his world: fine printing. Everything else could take a long walk off a short pier, including personal acquaintances. “[Cobden-Sanderson] liked to watch plants and insect forms, to get new ideas for binding tools . . . he lost friends to whom his life looked peculiar. The new work became far more important than their small talk.”
On one occasion, Cobden-Sanderson completely lost it when turning down the leather on a binding. In his own words, “I found it too short, and in a burst of rage I took the knife and cut the slips and tore the covers and boards off and tossed them to one side; then, in a very ecstasy of rage, seized one side again, tore the leather off the board, and cut it, and cut it, and slashed it with a knife. Then I was quite calm again; made so, I think by the wonder and awe and fear that came over me as in a kind of madness.” Nothing odd about that—just re-creating the printer scene from Office Space because the headband on his binding was too short. It’s not as if he were serially prone to rash and destructive behavior. . . .
To Cobden-Sanderson, handing over the most beautiful font that had ever been created so that Walker could use it for a second Doves operation outside his control was tantamount to Private Press blasphemy. Here is the famed sword Excalibur. Should we use it to harvest wheat? Or perhaps chop firewood? Or maybe pick food out of our goddamned teeth? No sir, I tell you, no!
Cobden-Sanderson gave his six months’ notice to Walker in June 1908, which Walker promptly dismissed. Foreseeing the storm that was about to break, Cobden-Sanderson’s son, Dickie, quickly abandoned the Doves Press to work for an uncle.
Emery Walker agreed that the partnership had to end. But while Cobden-Sanderson wanted to continue his fine printing crusade, Walker thought the most prudent course of action would be shutting down the Doves Press, liquidating everything, and dividing whatever proceeds were left fifty-fifty. Considering what Cobden-Sanderson was willing to do to leather binding that was too short, we can only imagine the tour of human horrors playing out behind his eyes upon hearing that.
In December 1908, Cobden-Sanderson refused Walker further entry into the Doves Press. In June 1909, Walker initiated proceedings against Cobden-Sanderson in the High Court of Justice. On June 14, Cobden-Sanderson wrote, “[Walker’s] proceedings at the utmost can only result in ‘damages’ or imprisonment: and to think of that! for nothing on earth will now induce me to part with the type . . . I have the will, and I have in my actual possession the punches and the matrices, without which it is impossible to have a Font of Type . . . I am, what he does not appear to realize, a Visionary and a Fanatic, and against a Visionary and a Fanatic he will beat himself in vain.”
Two days later, their friend Sydney Cockerell brought them to the negotiating table. According to a new proposal, the partnership would be dissolved on July 23, and Cobden-Sanderson would be allowed to retain the Doves Type, to use at his discretion, for the rest of his life. Upon his death, however, the font would pass to Emery Walker.
So here you have two obstinate old men (Cobden-Sanderson, age sixty-nine; Walker, age fifty-nine) agreeing to a printing truce, each stubbornly attempting to outlive the other. It was basically the Highlander approach to font ownership. There can be only one!
Even as early as this truce, Cobden-Sanderson had secretly vowed that Emery Walker would never own his font, but its destruction wouldn’t happen for almost a decade. Emery Walker left the Doves Press in the summer of 1909, and Cobden-Sanderson and his wife, Annie, continued running it for the next eight years. The press itself wasn’t what you might call “profitable.” It was now worth less than its original investment, and Annie’s money, which was subsidizing the operation, had nearly evaporated. The printing house had to be closed and the press moved into the attic of the Doves Bindery. Annie and T.J. left their home so they could rent it for extra cash. In 1909, upon the advice of friends, Annie convinced her husband to begin printing the plays of Shakespeare. You know you’re involved in a snobby movement when printing Shakespeare is considered selling out.
The Doves Press ran for a total of sixteen years, from 1900 to the first few weeks of 1917. It is worth noting that there was no perceptible drop in the quality of Doves printing after Walker’s exit. For all the contacts and experience that he had brought to the operation, Cobden-Sanderson appeared to be the artistic visionary behind those Books Beautiful.
“It is my wish,” Cobden-Sanderson wrote back in 1909, “that the Doves Press type shall never be subjected to the use of a machine other than the human hand . . . or to a press pulled otherwise than by the hand and arm of man or woman.” In his “Last Will and Testament of the Doves Press,” written in June of 1911, a solemn Cobden-Sanderson decreed, “To the Bed of the River Thames, the river on whose banks I have printed all my printed books, I bequeath The Doves Press Fount of Type.”
Strangely enough, Cobden-Sanderson wasn’t the only printer who sank his font into the waters of the Thames. In 1903, Charles Ricketts of the Vale Press threw his original Vale Type into the same river. More than forty years later, the Brook Type used by the Eragny Press (with whom Ricketts had formal involvement) was cast into the English Channel. Was there something in the water that drove fine printers mad, compelling them to sacrifice their font to it? As Ricketts explained, “It is undesirable that these fonts should drift into hands other than the designer’s and become stale by unthinking use.” This is a rather common fear of type designers. What happens when you’re not around to guide its use? What if your beloved type ends up on a package of Charmin toilet paper? No one wants their baby to become the Toilet Paper Font.
Cobden-Sanderson’s destruction of the Doves Type began just before Easter, on March 18, 1913. Over the course of three days, Cobden-Sanderson walked to the edge of nearby Hammersmith Bridge and hurled the punches and matrices of his type into the river. The loss of these components, used to cast pieces of Doves Type, would have made it nearly impossible to re-create any new sets of the font. After a short break, Cobden-Sanderson revived his plan of destruction in 1914, just in time for the madness that was about to spread across Europe in the form of the First World War. The brooding Cobden-Sanderson cited the war two years later as he was erasing the last remnants of his font: “If I am foolish, well, what can be more foolish than the whole world? My folly is of a light kind.”
Knowing that the Doves Press would close forever at the end of the year, Cobden-Sanderson started the destruction of the font itself on August 31, 1916. “It occurred to me that it was a suitable night and time,” he wrote, “so I went indoors, and taking first one page and then two, succeeded in destroying three. I will now go on till I have destroyed the whole of it.”
The word page might be a bit confusing in this context. Cobden-Sanderson was talking about packets of metal type, each weighing over six pounds. Carrying twenty pounds of type the half mile between his house and the bridge in the dark, then heaving it over the side, would have been a moderately difficult feat for any seventy-six-year-old. When you envision a whole font of type, you might be picturing the total number of letters needed to fill up one of those old-
timey partitioned printing cases. But when Cobden-Sanderson wrote that he was going to “go on till I have destroyed the whole of it,” he was actually talking about 2,600 pounds of metal type. In total, the Doves Type would have weighed more than a metric ton—and one very stubborn old man was determined to single-handedly destroy all of it.
At fifteen pounds (or two pages of type) per nighttime outing, Marianne Tidcombe estimates that Cobden-Sanderson took 170 individual trips to Hammersmith Bridge between August and January 1917 to do so. Sometimes he carried the metal type in linen bags, or wrapped in paper, but the most effective means was a converted wooden box with a sliding lid that he could overturn above the waters when he thought no one was watching.
“But what a weird business it is, beset with perils and panics! I have to see that no one is near or looking; then, over the parapet a box full, and then the audible and visible splash. One night I had nearly cast my type into a boat, another danger, which unexpectedly shot from under the bridge! And all night I feared to be asked by a policeman . . . what I had got in my ‘box.’”
Ignoring the obvious potential for physical harm incurred from chucking fifteen pounds of metal type off a bridge into passing boats, Cobden-Sanderson seemed genuinely enlivened by the criminality of his act. This despite running the risk of a potential jail sentence. With a hint of glee, he remarked, “Hitherto I have escaped detection, but in the vista of coming nights I see innumerable possibilities lurking in dark corners, and it will be a miracle if I escape them all.”
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