Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames (Bookshop| Amazon) relates the amazing tale, told many places, of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, a bookbinder who developed the famous Doves Type. To prevent the moveable type from falling into the hands of his younger business partner, Cobden-Sanderson methodically tossed bits of this metal type — thousands of them — into the Thames River. Decades later, some of that type has been recovered by graphic designer Robert Green. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Lost Typeface Recovered from the Thames”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
We were talking earlier about the book Mudlark, in search of London’s past along the River Thames by Laura Makelum. It may go by a different name in your part of the world. But I wanted to share a story from that book that will be of particular interest to people who love books and writers.
In the late 19th century, the leading bookbinder in London was Thomas James Cobden Sanderson. He founded Dove’s Bindery near the Thames in Hammersmith, and he printed his books using movable metal type, but not just any type. He was obsessed with creating the ideal typeface, almost a spiritual quest. He wanted to design a font that was so perfect, so beautiful, that it could be used to print the greatest works in the history of literature, the Bible and Shakespeare and Goethe. So he took on a younger business partner named Emery Walker, and together they studied books from the Italian Renaissance to develop and refine this font that they called Dove’s Type. And it’s this gorgeous font, Grant. You can see it. It’s clean and spare.
But by 1909, he had become so obsessed with perfecting this font that he didn’t want to trust it to anybody else, and he tried to buy out his younger business partner, but Walker refused. Eventually, they dissolved their partnership, and they agreed that Cobden Sanderson could continue using Dove’s type as long as he wanted, and then upon his death, all rights to the type would pass to Walker. But secretly, Cobden Sanderson couldn’t stand the idea of his precious metal type going to his former business partner. And mind you, by the time he started winding down his business, he had accumulated lots of those bits of type, like about half a million at least of these little metal pieces.
So in 1916, he started taking these nighttime strolls to Hammersmith Bridge, and he casually tossed his bits of type into the river a little bit at a time. And he was really proud of this. He actually wrote about it in his journal. So you got a picture of this 76-year-old guy strolling along the Thames, gleefully scattering those metal letters and numbers and punctuation like he was tossing fish food.
And it took him about six months, 170 visits, but he ended up disposing of literally more than a ton of metal type. And it turns out that a few years ago, a graphic designer named Robert Green became obsessed with this story, and he tried to figure out where the old guy might have tossed his type. And he started mudlarking in that spot. And darn if he didn’t find dozens of letters and bits of punctuation.
And there’s lots more to that story in this book, Mudlark, including a discovery that Laura Makelum makes, a piece of punctuation that the other guy hadn’t found. But isn’t that wild? I love that story. That’s so perfect.
I mean, I remember when I started out as a Macintosh tech support guy working for advertising agencies and publishing companies. This is many years ago. And our art directors would be so obsessed with type, I felt like half my job was helping them with type and managing type and buying type. And at one point, I could spec, that is, identify, I believe, every typeface in the Adobe Type Library. And that was thousands of types.
Yeah, seriously. I could tell you what it was. No, I can’t do it anymore because I’d spent so much time with these people working with type. There’s something about it, right? There’s something about it.
Yeah, and it’s directly connected to kind of the obsessiveness of a dictionary editor, which I am and have been, and the obsessiveness of a word historian, which I am. You know, you and I have that. And so I totally appreciate this old man going to the bridge because he wanted to protect his baby that he worked so hard on. Baby, right? I get it. I get it.
Yeah. Well, we should link there. There are all kinds of stories about this particular type. There are videos and you can see examples of it. It is a beautiful typeface and we should link to those on our website. Absolutely. We’ll link to our website. We’ll put the book there for you to check out. And if you’ve got a story that you read that you think we should know about and share with everyone else, let us know. 877-929-9673.
