Dove's Type

  In London at the turn of the 20th century, trouble was brewing.  At the Dove Press in Hammersmith, London in 1900, Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker were on the verge of a potential breakthrough in typography.  Cobden-Sanderson, a book binder and printer, felt that there were no type faces that he considered perfect, commissioning his friend and business partner Walker to design one that was.

  Cobden-Sanderson supervised the project while Walker drew out the design, and eventually Dove's Press was using the single size and style of type to print all of it's books. The face resembles some of the faces created by Nicolas Jensen in the 15th century, and  would become known as "Dove's Type." During the creation of the type, Cobden-Sanderson was very hands on, wanting every element to be perfect.

  Relations between the two men began to deteriorate, and by 1908 the two were in a bitter quarrel.  A year later the two men would find themselves in a legal battle for rights to the type.  It was settled that Cobden-Sanderson would retain the rights to the type face until his death, at which time the rights were to pass on to Walker.
 
  However in 1913 Cobden-Sanderson destroyed the matrices for the type, the molds which actually hold the type blocks, by throwing them into the Thames River off of a nearby Bridge. Between 1916 and 1917 he records in his journals that he, over the course of 170 trips, did the same thing to the actual type.  After his death in 1922, Walker sued Cobden-Sanderson's widow for £700 because of the loss of the type, over $43,000 in todays market.

  There seems to be something with this typeface that breeds obsession.

  In 2010, artist and designer Robert Green took it upon himself to try and reproduce the type face.  He searched for as many remaining examples of the type as he could, and ultimately wound up with 96 examples and quickly went to work on reproduction.  Similar to Cobden-Sanderson, Green became infatuated with every detail; every curve, every vertical, every slope and every horizontal.

  Green immersed himself in Cobden-Sanderson's journals to search for clues as to what bridge he may have disposed of the actual type off of.  He scoured the shores of the Thames and was actually able to recover three pieces of the original type.  And with help from the British government, an additional 147 pieces of original type were able to be recovered.  Half of the recovered type he has lent to the Emery Walker estate and is currently on display at his former residence.

  For a piece BBC News Magazine recently did on Robert Green and his efforts, follow the link.  Green's reproduction Dove's Type is also available for purchase here.