#the doves press

[theinfernaldesiremachine]

I want to know more about the guy who threw three tons of type into the Thames, please! Thank you!!

So first, thank you for this ask. I love talking about this guy, and you gave me an excuse to fact-check all of the absurd things I’ve learned about him over the past year or so and, as a result, learn even more absurd things about him. But oh man, where to start. So those tags were about a guy named Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson (often written about as T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, TJCS here for efficiency). He was an absolutely fascinating dude – quit like three or four different career paths before actually becoming a lawyer and just fucking hating it. He was hanging out with his buddy William Morris (yes, THAT William Morris*) lamenting his lack of satisfying work when Morris’s wife Jane (yes THAT Jane Morris**) suggested he try his hand at bookbinding. (Side note (there are going to be so many side notes): TJCS is the one who coined the name “Arts and Crafts” for the decorative arts movement that Morris basically founded, and TJCS was hugely influential in that circle as well.) He started a bookbinding apprenticeship and just kind of blew everyone away. He was crazy good at it much faster than he should have been, and he founded the Doves Bindery (named after the nearby pub, not the bird) with capital from his wife.

(The biggest side note: TJCS was a hard core Wife Guy, and Annie Cobden-Sanderson was insanely cool in her own right. She was a famous suffragette, was arrested and imprisoned for demonstrating in the lobby of parliament, and was an evangelist for vegetarianism. This whole post could be about her, actually. TJCS thought she was so cool that he took her name – he was T. J. Sanderson, she was Annie Cobden, and when they married, they both took the name Cobden-Sanderson. She went to the U.S. in the early 20th century to teach the suffragettes there what she had learned protesting in England, so I feel like she is in part responsible for my right to vote. Love her.)

Okay, but back to TJCS. Our very talented, very egotistical, very tempestuous little dude was Not Satisfied binding whatever books came in the door because he had big feelings about what the Ideal Book should be. To that end, he teamed up with printer and engraver Emery Walker, William Morris’s former partner at the Kelmscott Press (yes, THAT Kelmscott Press***) to found the Doves Press so that he could create the most beautiful books by printing only the most beautiful words. TJCS was the “visionary and fanatic” (his words) and Walker was the technician. TJCS commissioned a new typeface to be used exclusively by the Doves Press. It was based on some of the most beautiful typography ever created – the capitals based on Nicholas Jensen’s 15th century roman that’s still considered one of the standards of perfection in type design (if you’ve ever used Centaur or read a book set in it, that’s kind of the contemporary version of Jensen’s roman). The Doves Press was unexpectedly successful and it along with Kelmscott Press laid the foundation for what would be the fine press movement of the 20th century. The Doves Bindery now only bound Doves Press books, and if you have a local library or museum that has examples in their collection, it’s well worth the trip to go look at these books.

(The opening of Genesis from The Doves Bible, widely regarded as one of the most perfect books ever printed, image from Jonkers Rare Books.)

Of course, “tempestuous” and “egotistical” are not a great recipe for long and healthy partnerships, even when coupled with “very talented,” and TJCS and Walker had a mega falling out. TJCS was a perfectionist the level of which it is hard to overstate. Walker was… not. He was a printer. You printed your pages, and that was that; sometimes there were going to be errors. Also, he liked to make money. The Doves Type was widely regarded as the most beautiful typeface in existence, and there were lots of folks willing to pay to use it in their own printing pursuits like advertising and other commercial work. I’m sure you can imagine how well this went over with TJCS. After what seemed like endless fighting, a mutual friend, Sydney Cockerell****, suggested a compromise: TJCS would get exclusive use of the Doves Type for the rest of his life, but Emery Walker would own it and could do whatever he wanted with it once TJCS died. Walker figured this was the best he was going to get and agreed. TJCS agreed at the time, but as he got older, he got even more tempestuous and obsessive, and this is where the river comes in. Dude grabbed all of the matrices and punches (the stuff you would need to make more of the Doves Type) and literally threw it into the Thames. Fine, now the only Doves Type that exists is what’s in active use by the Doves Press. That was not good enough for our good friend and Weird Little Guy TJCS. No, in addition to throwing the matrices and punches into the river, he ALSO threw every last piece of type in the workshop into the river. This is fucking hilarious because it’s not like a print shop just has a few copies of the alphabet laying around. A working press (even a small one) like the Doves Press had literally more than a ton of type in the workshop. TJCS was so petty and so determined that only HE would ever get to use this type that he made almost TWO HUNDRED trips to Hammersmith Bridge to dump type in the river.

And the story doesn’t even end there! And I’m typing this alone on my couch instead of trying to retell the abridged version over drinks with friends, so guess what? You get the rest of the story too! The Doves Type is still to this day considered one of the most beautiful typefaces ever created, and I get to introduce you to another single-minded, obsessive little guy who REALLY REALLY wanted to create the most accurate digital facsimile possible of the Doves Type. His name is Robert Green, and at first he was just looking at the texts printed by the Doves Press and trying to recreate it from the printed pages themselves. He did a pretty good job. In his quest, read everything he could about TJCS and the Doves Press, including TJCS’s diaries. I’m not sure anyone before Green really took literally TJCS’s declaration that the type had been “dedicated & consecrated” to the river but Green sure did. He even figured out that TJCS’s bridge of choice must have been Hammersmith. And then he started digging around. Almost a hundred years after TJCS donated it to the Thames, Green found a piece of the Doves Type in the mud under Hammersmith Bridge. With help from Port of London Authority divers, more than one hundred and fifty pieces of the Doves Type were recovered, and Green was able to revise his facsimile based on actual specimens.

The absolutely insane consequence of this is that YOU, dear friend, can buy your own license to the Doves Type and use it for whatever unhinged purpose you can dream up. Whether your interests align with TJCS and you also want to create the Ideal Book, or you feel like typesetting your favorite shitpost, one of the most beautiful typefaces ever cut is at your disposal.

Feels a little silly to put the footnotes under the cut given how long this got, but we're running solely on vibes now, so here we go.

*Founding member of the Arts and Crafts movement, iconic designer, you definitely know who William Morris is. Or at least you've seen his wallpaper.

**Similarly, textile artist, muse and model for the painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Arts and Crafts movement, you know who Jane Morris is.

***If you know Kelmscott press, it's likely because you know The Kelmscott Chaucer. It is widely considered one of the most beautiful books ever printed, and it's likely that you've seen images of its pages if your interests run bookish at all (and I kind of assume they do if you've managed to read this far).

****Okay, so I footnoted Sydney Cockerell mostly to talk about his younger brother, Douglas. You probably don't know who Douglas Cockerell was, but I think you should! The fine binding tradition in England is an incredibly vibrant community of artists, and many of them can trace their education directly to TJCS through his apprentice Douglas Cockerell. Cockerell quickly became a giant in the craft and trained a generation of bookbinders himself, notably Bernard Middleton, another deeply talented binder and teacher who taught many, including Dominic Riley, from whom I have been lucky enough to take classes.

[hey-heigo]

au where everything is the same but kyoko is this thangg (design by @/babirousa)

[uwmspeccoll]

Wood Engraving Wednesday

GERI WADDINGTON

These wood engravings are by English artist Geri Waddington (b. 1953), and are inserted into her brief essay about her visit to "French Papermakers & Other House Guests," published in Matrix 29 (Summer 2010), pp. 14-16, printed at John and Rosalind Randle’s Whittington Press in Risbury, Herefordshire, England in an edition of 725 copies.

Waddington describes her visits to Moulin du Verger, in Puymoyen, France, operated by proprietor and master papermaker Jacques Brejoux, Moulin de la Rouzique (now a museum) in Périgord, and the Moulin de Larroque in Couze-Saint-Front. Much of her narrative, however, dwells on the house she stayed at which had many other non-human residents, including doves and bats that live in "pigeoneer" holes and lizards that live in the walls, as reflected in these engravings. Other denizens included frogs, toads, hornets, masonry bees, and a barn owl. Waddington writes:

I am not sure if my blocks or my printing can do justice to these beautiful papers, but perhaps it is enough just to own some of these little pieces of history, mementos of a continuum of craftsmanship stretching back nearly five hundred years.

Geri Waddington trained in painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and started engraving in 1995. In 2001 she was elected a member of the venerable Society of Wood Engravers, and served as its chair in 2014.

View more posts with work by Geri Waddington.

View more posts with wood engravings!

[leveloneandup]

👋

[power-chords]

The Doves Type legend is one of the most enduring in typographic history and probably the most infamous. It’s the story of a typeface and a bitter feud between the two partners of Hammersmith’s celebrated Doves Press, Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker, leading to the protracted disposal of their unique metal type into London’s River Thames. Starting in 1913 with the initial dumping of the punches and matrices, by the end of January 1917 an increasingly frail Cobden-Sanderson had made hundreds of clandestine trips under cover of darkness to Hammersmith Bridge and systematically thrown 12lb parcels of metal type into the murky depths below. As one person so aptly commented on Twitter recently, this notorious tale bears all the hallmarks of a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

The original Doves Type was crafted by master punchcutter Edward Prince, based on drawings produced by Percy Tiffin of Nicolas Jenson’s pioneering 15th-century Venetian type. William Morris, founder of the Kelmscott Press, had actually developed his own ‘Golden’ type some years before The Doves Press came into being but Doves is held by experts as being more faithful to the original Venetian letterforms.

The Doves Type was commissioned in 1899 and created solely by Prince in 16 pt; it was used in all of the press’s publications including their iconic edition of the King James Bible. Each Doves Press book was beautifully bound and, notes Green, noticeably “stripped of decorative borders and illustration, the elegantly clear & legible type acting alone as visual siren-song.”

By 1908, despite successful Milton prints and the aforementioned Bible, the Press was in dire financial difficulty. Subscribers began melting away after Walker had effectively left in 1906 as the bitter & acrimonious dispute took hold between the partners. On finally dissolving their partnership in 1909, Cobden-Sanderson began attempts to wriggle out of an earlier promise that, should the partnership cease, Walker would receive a fount of type ‘for his own use’. Walker retaliated, issuing a writ insisting that the Press shut down completely and he receive 50% of remaining assets. In 1909, the Press’s only valuable asset was the type.

A compromise was reached, brokered by their exasperated friend Sir Sydney Cockerell, which allowed Cobden-Sanderson uncontrolled use of the type for as long as he lived, at which time it would pass to Emery Walker, if he did not die first.

The thought of ‘his’ typeface being used by anyone else, and in a manner beyond his control, prompted Cobden-Sanderson’s now infamous course of action. Only the Doves Press, run exclusively by him, could be bestowed the honour of printing his type. And so the mission to destroy it, beginning with the punches and matrices on Good Friday 1913, began. On an almost nightly basis from August 1916 the ailing septuagenarian dumped the type into the Thames, wrapped in paper parcels and tied with string; “bequeathed to the river” as he put it in his personal diary. Every piece of this beautiful typeface, more than a ton of metal, was destroyed in a prolonged ritual sacrifice.

—Raised from the dead: The Doves Type story, 2013

After working on a revised digital facsimile Robert Green decided that he would try and find some of the original metal type. Using the sources available, including Cobden-Sanderson's published journals, Mr Green worked out where he thought the type was thrown from the bridge into the Thames.

At low tide, and with a mudlarkers licence, he scoured the Thames foreshore and found three pieces of the original type.

Due to the dangerous nature of the Thames currents and tides a team of professional divers from the Port of London Authority then spent two days looking for more type and a total of 150 pieces were recovered.

—One man's obsession with rediscovering a lost typeface, BBC News, 2015

[fadeintoyou1993]

thank god dove cameron didnt get cast as glinda that girl cant be normal around black women

[ultrameganicolaokay]

Sesame Street #4 by Joey Esposito, Sean Dove and Valentina Pinto. Cover by Dove. Variant covers by (2) Erin Hunting and (3) Andy Price. Out in November.

"Welcome back to Sesame Street with an all-new, all-ages tale from writer Joey Esposito (Batman: Urban Legends) and artist Sean Dove (Brobots)! You're invited—the Amazing Mumford is taking the stage on Sesame Street for a night of magic! But when The Count volunteers to help with a trick, it does not go according to plan. All of the numbers have disappeared from Sesame Street! Can Mumford reverse his trick? Or are the numbers gone for good?"

[lgbtqreads]

Inside an Anthology: Joy/Us ed. by Cherry Potts and Jeremy Dixon

Today on the site I’m delighted to spotlight Joy/Us, an anthology of poetry edited by Cherry Potts and Jeremy Dixon and published by Arachne Press! Here’s a little more about the collection: Arachne Press has long been a champion of LGBTQ+ writers, but we’ve never before published an anthology of LGBTQ+ poetry. These are joyful poems that celebrate all that is best about our community/ies and…

[marvelsgirl616]

Dove Cameron at the Barbie World Premiere 🩷

[gogodollie]

Sister getting freaky with Nihil's body with Nihil watching ok that's.....that's on my mind now while reading all the gold you've been posting

i legally was not allowed to say this unprompted but you understood exactly what my heart meant. i love you.

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

John the Baptist Prepares the Way

1 ¶ In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea

2 and saying, Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

3 For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah, who said, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.

4 And the same John had his raiment of camel’s hair and a leathern girdle about his loins, and his food was locusts and wild honey.

5 Then Jerusalem and all Judaea and all the region round about Jordan went out to him

6 and were baptized of him in the Jordan, confessing their sins.

7 ¶ But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who taught you to flee from the wrath to come?

8 Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance

9 and think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham as our father, for I say unto you that God is able to raise up children unto Abraham of these stones.

10 And now the axe is also laid unto the root of the trees; therefore, every tree which does not bring forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.

11 I indeed baptize you in water unto repentance, but he that comes after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear; he shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire,

12 whose fan is in his hand; and he will thoroughly purge his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the storehouse, but he will burn up the chaff with fire that shall never be quenched.

13 ¶ Then Jesus came from Galilee to Jordan unto John to be baptized of him.

14 But John resisted him much, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?

15 And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now, for thus it is expedient for us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him.

16 And Jesus, after he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water; and, behold, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting upon him;

17 and, behold, a voice from the heavens, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. — Matthew 3 | Jubilee Bible 2000 (JUB) Jubilee Bible 2000 Copyright © 2013, 2020 by Ransom Press International. Cross References: Leviticus 11:22; Joshua 15:61; Judges 1:16; 1 Samuel 14:26; 2 Samuel 23:7; Ezra 10:1; Psalm 1:4; Psalm 2:7; Psalm 40:7-8; Psalm 92:12; Proverbs 28:4; Isaiah 1:31; Isaiah 4:4; Isaiah 11:2; Isaiah 40:3; Isaiah 42:1; Daniel 2:44; Matthew 2:1; Matthew 2:22; Matthew 4:17; Matthew 12:18; Matthew 12:34; Mark 1:3,4 and5; Mark 1:9; Luke 1:16; Luke 3:8; Luke 16:24; John 4:34; John 8:33; Acts 26:20; Romans 1:13; Hebrews 7:23

“Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand”

[andrew-buchan-fansite]

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More from the Black Doves press day

[uwmspeccoll]

A Big Apple Feathursday

These collagraph prints by American artist, educator, and printer John Ross (1921-1917), made for the 1998 Birds of Manhattan, depict a few of the more common birds of that island against various architectural features of the city. It's sometimes easy to forget how biodiverse Manhattan is, particularly in bird life. Manhattan lies on the eastern route of the Atlantic flyway, so it receives many visitors as well as serving as a year-round residence for many species of birds.

The book, another donation form the estate of our late friend Dennis Bayuzick, was conceived, designed, illustrated and printed in an edition of 40 copies by John Ross at his East Hampton, New York High Tide Press in collaboration with relief aid officer and Greek and Latin scholar Lloyd Jonnes, who wrote the text. The binding, with its inset painted relief of a Cardinal, is by James D. Marcantonio at his Hope Bindery in Providence, R.I. This book was selected for the 1998 “50 Books / 50 Covers” by the American Institute for Graphic Arts in New York. 

View another post on work by John Ross.

View more Feathursday posts.

[leveloneandup]

christenpress I’m celebrating CONMEBOL Copa América USA 2024™ and all my wins with Dove Beauty Finish Dry Spray! Instantly dry 72-hour odor and underarm sweat protection that’s vegan and safe for sensitive skin? Sounds like a win to me. Make the switch from a deodorant stick to Dry Sprays by using the link in my bio and rock your celebration dance

[choface]

going to see saltburn with mostly zero spoilers

[a-rogue-god]

so many of my sadness swept away by thoughts of cute john/dove stuff. dont cry. them laughing over something stupid n funny while they're just enjoying each other's company