THE RIVER THAMES | And The Gorgeous Typeface That Drove A Man Mad And Sparked A 100-Year Mystery

No one seemed to notice him: A dark figure who often came to stand at the edge of London’s Hammersmith Bridge on nights in 1916. No one seemed to notice, either, that during his visits he was dropping something into the River Thames. Something heavy.

Over the course of more than a hundred illicit nightly trips, this man was committing a crime—against his partner, a man who owned half of what was being heaved into the Thames. This  founder of the legendary Doves Press and the mastermind of its typeface, was a man named T.J. Cobden Sanderson. He was taking the metal type that he had painstakingly overseen and dumping thousands of pounds of it into the river.

As a driving force in the Arts & Crafts movement in England, Cobden Sanderson championed traditional craftsmanship against the rising tides of industrialization. He was brilliant and creative, and he was concerned that the typeface he had designed would be sold to a mechanized printing press after his death by his business partner, with whom he was feuding.

So, night after night, he was making it his business to “bequeath” it to the river, in his words, screwing his partner out of his half of their work and destroying a legendarily beautiful typeface forever. Or so it seemed.

Almost exactly a century later, ex-military divers who work for the Port of London Authority were gearing up to descend into the Thames to look for the small metal bits—perhaps hundreds of thousands of them—that Cobden Sanderson had thrown overboard so many years ago. They were doing this at the personal expense of Robert Green, a designer who has spent years researching and recreating the lost typeface.

It’s not hard to imagine how crazy he must have seemed. A civilian offering to pay the city’s salvage divers to troll the depths of the muddy Thames, possibly for weeks, looking for tiny chunks of metal that were thrown there by a deranged designer more than a century ago? Yeah, that’s pretty crazy.

In the end, it only took them 20 minutes to find some. What they ended up uncovering over their two day dive was several hundred pieces of type.

Why would anyone search for it? What made it so special, so worth saving?

The Doves Press was a unique entity.  At the cusp of the modern age, Doves was founded to preserve a craft that went back centuries. It was also destined to fail, to end up as a historical eccentricity that died out just as the mechanized printing press sprang onto the scene. It valued one thing above all others: Doing things by hand, and doing them with utter devotion.