Doves Press

The Doves Press was a private press based in Hammersmith, London. During nearly seventeen years of operation, the Doves Press produced notable examples of twentieth-century typography. A distinguishing feature of its books was a specially-devised font, known variously as the Doves Roman, the Doves Press Fount of Type, or simply the Doves type.

Opening page of Genesis from the Doves Bible

The Doves Press business

The Doves Press was founded by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson before 1900 when he asked Emery Walker to join him. The business was financed by Anne Cobden-Sanderson. Their partnership was dissolved in 1908[1] but Cobden-Sanderson continued to print.

Cobden-Sanderson commissioned the press's type, which was drawn under Walker's supervision, and the Doves Bindery which he had set up in 1893 bound the books he and Walker printed. The Press produced all its books using a single size of this type, between 1900 and 1916, and is considered to have been a significant contributor to the Arts and Crafts movement. The founders were associated with William Morris and the Kelmscott Press. The Doves type was based on types used by Nicolas Jenson from the 1470s, similar to Morris's earlier Golden Type, and like it cut by punchcutter Edward Prince.[2][3][4][5][6]

The press, at No. 1, Hammersmith Terrace, was named after The Dove, an old riverside pub nearby. The Doves Press was responsible for the Doves Bible (5 vols, 1902–1904), which is considered to be one of the best examples of its kind.[3]

The Doves type dispute

By 1909 Cobden-Sanderson and Walker were in a protracted and bitter dispute involving the rights to the Doves Type in the dissolution of their partnership. As part of the partnership dissolution agreement, all rights to the Doves Type were to pass to Walker upon the death of Cobden-Sanderson. Instead of letting this happen, the matrices were destroyed by Cobden-Sanderson on Good Friday, 21 March 1913 by throwing them into the Thames river off Hammersmith Bridge in London, a short walk from the Press. As further recorded in his Journals, he began the destruction of the types beginning 31 August 1916 at midnight, when "it seemed a suitable night, and time".[7] He is said to have completed the task in January 1917, after 170 trips to the river,[8] though his Journals do not mention the culmination.

Re-creating the Doves type

The first digital revival of the Doves Type was made in 1994 by Swedish designer Torbjörn Olsson who added a new italic, and whose fonts reproduce the soft corners and imperfections of the printed characters.[9] In 2013, the designer Robert Green began to create a more polished digital version of the Doves type.[10] In 2015, after searching the riverbed of the Thames near Hammersmith Bridge with help from the Port of London Authority, Green managed to recover 150 pieces of the original type, which helped him to refine the font.[11][12] The re-created Doves Type is distributed by Typespec. Other digital revival projects are "Mebinac" by Alan Hayward and "Thames-Capsule" by Raphaël Verona and Gaël Faure. [13]

Notes
  1. "No. 28274". The London Gazette. 27 July 1909. p. 5759.
  2. Naylor, Gillian: "The things that might be: British design after Morris". In Diane Waggoner, ed.: The beauty of life: William Morris & the art of design. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003, ISBN 0-500-28434-2, p. 122-124
  3. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05. Archived April 17, 2006, at the Wayback Machine
  4. Dreyfus, John (1974). "New Light on the Design of Types for the Kelmscott and Doves Presses". The Library. s5-XXIX (1): 36–41. doi:10.1093/library/s5-XXIX.1.36.
  5. Tuohy, Stephen (1990). "A New Photograph of Edward Prince, Typefounders' Punchcutter". Matrix. 10: 135–142.
  6. "Private Press Types". Elston Press. Retrieved 8 February 2017.
  7. The Journals of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson | 1879–1922 | Volume II — p. 296
  8. "The fight over the Doves". The Economist. 21 December 2013. Retrieved 7 February 2015.
  9. Luc Devroye, McGill University, Montreal
  10. Doves type at typespec
  11. Steven, Rachael (3 February 2015). "Recovering the Doves Type". CreativeReview Blog. Archived from the original on 6 February 2015. Retrieved 7 February 2015.
  12. Wilmshurst, Nick (7 February 2015). "Lost typeface printing blocks found in river Thames". BBC News. Retrieved 7 February 2015.
  13. http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-34361.html

References
  • Marianne Tidcombe. The Doves Press. London: British Library; New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2002 [i.e. 2003].

Further reading
  • Cable, C. (1974). The printing types of the Doves press: Their history and destruction. Library Quarterly, 44(3), 219-230.
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