Doves Type

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1:31Here at 99PI, we do stories about all kinds of things. Stories about architecture, about transit, about history, even the occasional sports story. But one kind of story that always elicits a huge response from a very vocal constituency are stories about type. You guys love stories about fonts and typefaces. So a couple months ago, I was having dinner with Helen Zaltzman and her husband and collaborator Martin Ostwick. and she told me about a story they developed for a live stage show about an epic feud over a typeface of all things. And I knew I had to get that story on the show. We're talking about two people who set up an artisanal printing press, which was kind of unusual at the time.

2:17They were very groundbreaking in their way. And it was also not really something that people did if they didn't already have money. You might recognize Helen's voice if you, like me, are a listener to The Illusionist or Answer Me This. But this piece is an adaptation of an Illusionist live show that Helen and Martin did called Souvenirs. Here it is.

2:44This is the story of the friendship of Thomas Cobden Sanderson and Emery Walker, and of the implosion of that friendship. We know the impact of what they said to each other, but we don't know their exact words, so Thomas will be performed by the Glockenspiel and Emery by violin.

3:10Two friends brought together and driven apart by type. Yes, type as in printed lettering. I'm the narrator Helen Zaltzman and this is our orchestra and chorus, Martin Austwick. Type means the design The way that letters look And the little bits of metal That print words in a book We find Thomas and Emery in London, in the district of Hammersmith, where their houses were and their workplaces. We don't know exactly how they first met in the late 1880s. Perhaps in your favourite local pub, the Doves. In a tightly packed bar, you could have bumped into each other. Sorry. That's alright. Maybe one of you bought the other a drink.

4:04You shared a joke. Did all the getting to know you chat? Where did you grow up? Where'd you get a good price on moustache wax these days? Who's your favourite spice girl? The same one. However it happened, sometime, somewhere, your friendship was born. Friendship never ends. The Spice Girls taught us so. We'll beat each other's ride or die until it's time to go. You two ran in the same circles because you shared two major interests, socialist politics and printing. A friend describes you, Thomas, as a seeker all his life. You dealt with depression, and often life was hard for you because you really felt things so keenly.

4:59You had been a lawyer, but you became a bookbinder after your wife, Annie, complained that your interests were too abstract. You took to bookbinding very quickly, Thomas, and were brilliant at it, the best in the biz. In 1893, you set up your own book bindery, the Doves Bindery, named after your favourite pub, which was two doors along from the bindery. Emery, you had had a difficult childhood. You grew up in poverty, and you'd had to leave school aged 13 after your father was blinded by an accident at work, so you needed to earn money for the family. You didn't have much, but you did have some books, and you loved them.

5:37This led you to a career in typography, and in 1886, Emery, you also founded a photo-engraving company capable of unprecedentedly good reproductions of photographs and illustrations, magical for the time, the cuttingest of cutting edges. Both of you, Emery and Thomas, were big deals in the art and craft of making books. And once you found each other, you encouraged each other. In the best friendships, you do amplify one another. Shine a light in the mirror, double the light. Thomas once sent Emery a note written in a discarded bookbinding. It said,

6:17These words transform a piece of rubbish into an object with value. Souvenir is French for memory, and therefore all souvenirs must be imperfect. To a perfect friend, an imperfect souvenir We don't need reminders, because you're always near Really near, because Emery lived at number 3 Hammersmith Terrace and in 1897, Thomas and his family moved into number 7 down the street. And half a mile east along the River Thames, Emery rented his business premises from Thomas, who worked at his bindery next door. So your work and domestic lives were very close. Even that wasn't close enough. You went on family holidays together at neighbouring cottages.

7:12And even that wasn't close enough. After at least a decade of friendship, in 1899 you decided to take your relationship to the next level. You set up a printing press together. The Doves Press. Friendship never ends Spice Girls taught us so We'll be each other's right or die Until it's time to go We can carve them in stone We can cast them in steel What lasts longer than the words Is the way they make you feel

7:57The Dove's Press was born. Thomas, you had all this passion for type design, what you called the book beautiful, but you didn't really know anything about printing. And for that, you needed Emery, who knew all about how to set up and run a printing press. A few years earlier, Emery, you'd set up a press with none other than William Morris, and you helped him design his own typefaces. William Morris asked you to be his business partner, and you actually turned him down because you thought he would have been too controlling. but when Thomas asked you to be his partner, you said yes. Emery, you couldn't afford to contribute financially to the business, and Thomas, you didn't have any money of your own, but your wife Annie was from a wealthy family, so she lent you money to start up the business,£1 ,600, equivalent in today's money to about£250 ,000.

8:53I know Thomas, you were so excited You wrote a letter to your teenage son Dickie about how you'd cleared out the attic at your bindery to fill with print equipment and you couldn't wait to sit on a high stool next to your great friend Emery both printing your hearts out Were you excited too Emery? Ah, nobody had asked you if you wanted to sit on a high stool printing It's okay though the two of you had the jewel in the Doves Press's crown, your own in-house typeface, Doves Type. Doves Type was based on a typeface designed by French printer Nicholas Jensen in Venice in the late 1400s, but Thomas and Emery wanted their type to look to the future, not to the past.

9:36The ornate printing styles of the time Thomas found unreadable. Doves Press books were to be beautiful in themselves, without illustrations, without ornamentation. The letters should not be more beautiful than the literature they were forming. We can carve them in stone, we can cast them in steel. What lasts longer than the words is the way they make you feel. The Dove's type was lauded at the time as trimmed to a slim grace which suggests a racehorse at the top of its training with no ounce of superfluous flesh but full of spring and life. Wow, people were really horny for type back then. And the Doves Press began printing books that were received as aesthetically revelatory, with their undecorated white margins and text in plain black 16-point Doves type enlivened with graceful but unostentatious red letters, hand-drawn by the calligrapher Edward Johnston, who went on later to design the iconic typeface of the London transport system.

10:41The Doves Press was a huge influence on typography and book design. When the Doves Press printed Bibles, critics said, even if you've already got a Bible, you have to try these Doves Press Bibles. I don't know, man, they're just so much more Bible-y than the other Bibles. These Doves Press Bibles now sell for£45 ,000. Thomas and Emery brought complementary skills to the Doves Press. Thomas perfectionism, Emery pragmatism. Thomas is all about the art of printing and Emery is all about the business. So it should have been a great success. But Thomas is all about the art of printing and Emery is all about the business.

11:26Things started to go sour almost immediately. Who knows exactly what they said? Furious rows or... giving each other the cold shoulder Thomas and Emery, you were not on the same page Alright, Thomas, yes, you felt you were doing all the work of the printing and the proofreading and Emery was hardly ever there and didn't respond to your lengthy arguments about the best and in your opinion only way to design the word of You were a perfect friend But now I despair Of still looks all wrong to me And you still don't care

12:16Oh, yeah, Emery, you did care, but you had a whole other business to run because you had to earn money to live and you needed to get things done quickly that Thomas liked to spend weeks or months mulling over. You were so busy, you'd never stop to eat lunch. You'd keep going until dinner, which was wine and one large onion. Just a whole onion? Raw? Eaten like an apple? Also, you were there at the printing press when you could be, and when you did express your opinions about what was being printed, Thomas would respond somewhere between unreceptive and furious. Thomas says, Emery has onion breath.

12:59But here was the real point of contention. Emery, you always referred to Doves as our press, whereas Thomas, you would say my press. Ouch. It was only two years between the release of the Spice Girls' first single, Wannabe, and Jerry leaving the band. Did that feel like longer to you? It did to me, but in reality it was just under two years. And that was about the amount of time that the Doves press had been going before Thomas wanted to break up with Emery, or Emery wanted to break up with Thomas. Have any of you experienced friendship breakups in adulthood? Mine have felt more acutely painful than romantic breakups, and there aren't even songs to soundtrack the predicament.

14:05I don't know if there is such a thing as a clean break, but there is such a thing as a quick break, and this was not it. The Doves Press officially opened in 1900. By 1902, Thomas and Emery's friendship was in ruins, but the working partnership didn't officially end for another seven years. Seven years is the length of time between the Spice Girls going on indefinite hiatus and reforming for a reunion tour, including Jerry. That's how long it took these two just to break up. And during that time, even though you had fallen out and were fighting a lot, you still went on holidays to the cottages that were next door to each other.

14:42Why? Why didn't you go somewhere else? Of course, you both didn't see why you should be the one to not go. Friendship never ends Except for when it does It hurts worse than gallstones But at least we've still got doves Yeah, at least we've still got doves right, fellas. One of the reasons Thomas and Demery's breakup was so protracted was because of a battle over who would get custody of the doves type, which legally belonged to both of them. But Thomas wanted to keep doves for his sole use. He didn't want Emery or anyone else to print anything in doves that he didn't control. And remember, at this time, type was a physical object, or rather thousands of physical objects, so you couldn't just make infinite digital copies.

15:40And if you didn't have the type, then you didn't have the type. So Thomas offered Emery a small amount of money to relinquish his claim on dubs. Emery didn't accept. They battled back and forth, back and forth, for years. Meanwhile, the dubs press was financially failing. It was successful in making and selling its beautiful hand-printed books, but hand-printing is not where the big money is. Or where the small money is. Private printing presses were a rich man's game, and neither Thomas nor Emery was a rich man. Emery wanted to cut the losses and shut down the Doves press. Thomas disagreed and banned Emery from the premises.

16:26To get some cash to keep the press going, Thomas and his wife Annie rented out their home. Annie went to stay with her sister, and Thomas moved into the attic of the Doves press and bindery, directly above where his ex-business partner Emery was still working at his photo-engraving business in the space he rented from Thomas. Things started to get so ugly between Thomas and Emery, court proceedings began. But somehow, late in 1908, they did at last reach a compromise. Thomas, who was a decade older than Emery, would continue to use the Dove's type for the rest of his life, and upon his death, it would become Emery's.

17:04It's a kind of a morbid deal, but it was a deal. In 1909, after seven years of wrangling, the Dubs Press Partnership was at last declared officially over. And here is where our story turns to, if I can't have you, no one will, but make it type. When our friendship ends, because the Spice Girls lied, I'll need you to know I hate you, even after I've died. Because what did you do, Thomas? What did you do? You threw the dove's tide into the river. Throwing something away into a body of water sounds spontaneous, doesn't it? Like in a film, someone rips up a photo of their ex and flushes it down the toilet.

17:54Or they throw their engagement ring into a lake. Whereas throwing away a whole typeface was a lot more time and effort. For once, Thomas, you chose action over abstraction. You planned this for how long?

18:13Seven years. Thomas, you were really excited about this. And you were really excited about eventually getting found out. But you waited. You waited long enough to write a 116-page apologia about why you did it. Let's not forget, the word apologia does not mean an apology. It's a defence argument. You were going to publish it too, weren't you, Thomas, in 1913, but you realised it might be incriminating. So you waited. You waited until you wanted to close down the Doves Press, and until you were printing the last ever Doves book. And when you were ready, which was one night in August 1916, you waited till dusk.

18:57Then you walked the half-mile from home to Hammersmith Bridge that spans the River Thames. You crossed towards the south side where the water was deepest and you threw the type into the river. And this wasn't just a one-night thing, because, Thomas, how much type can you carry in one go? 10 or 15 pounds. And how much type was there altogether? At least 2 ,600 pounds. So, to get rid of 2 ,600 pounds of metal type, a maximum of 15 pounds at a time, means you went to the bridge how many times? You're a printer, not a mathematician. Thank you, Emery. 173. It took Thomas a minimum of 173 trips to throw away all of the dove's type.

19:51Each night you took the latest page of type that you'd finished printing with and wrapped it up in white paper or put it in a bag or filled your pockets with it or your favourite put it into a wooden toolbox with a sliding lid so you could sprinkle it gently off the bridge. You didn't want to make a splash. You didn't want anyone to notice what you were doing. You were scared of being caught. It would be humiliating. It would be a crime because this type was legally promised to Emery. So you would wait until nobody else was around on foot. You would hope for a passing bus or car so the noise would cover any splashes and you would tip the type into the water.

20:27Night after night. Page after page. Sometimes, Thomas, you messed up. Once a boat appeared from under the bridge and you nearly threw the type right into it. Another time, your bundles of type dropped onto a ledge by the feet of the bridge and you were tormented by these two packages conspicuously wrapped in bright white paper, sitting there in full view. What if they gave you away? Someone passing by in a boat might think, Oh, what are these? And open them up and find the famous Doves type. and oh, then there would be the police and the newspapers and the courts and the shame. The shame. The shame.

21:06Twice you started hiring a boat to go to retrieve the packages, but you decided that would be even more conspicuous. People on the bridge or on the river or its banks might think, hey, why is that guy in a boat picking up those packages? Did he throw a type away? Officer! You justified your disposal of doves as making a bequest to the river. but this all took a toll on you. Late summer, change to autumn, change to winter and night after night, you, a 76-year-old man walked a mile round trip through the bitter cold with as much metal as you could carry metal that you loved so much you must destroy it rather than let it live without you.

21:48For five months, you kept making your trips to the bridge and by the end of January 1917 you had drowned all the doves. Melt down the steel Grind down the stone There's nothing left Except dust and rust and bone After closing the doves' press, Thomas destroyed all of the records. He said he wanted no history of petty details, only the books themselves. I want the history of petty details, Thomas, and if you hadn't been such a petty details aficionado, if you hadn't thrown a whole typeface into the river, I wouldn't be talking about you now. I remember you not because of the art and thoughts you added to the world, but the thing you took away.

22:43Is that really what you wanted? Is that the impression you wanted to leave?

22:50Thomas, you were feeling your age and the fragility of your health, so you sold everything you could sell. You needed to prepare for the future. Your wife Annie had lost so much of her money on the Doves press, you wanted something for her to live on after you died, and to deal with the legal costs of you having destroyed the Doves type. On the 7th of September 1922, Thomas died peacefully in his bed in the attic of the Doves bindery. And after that, four things happened. Well, uncountable things happened. Nearly a decade on, girl power is back. My girls have announced that they are reforming for a world tour.

23:28Okay, we did the Olympics. Now they're back, back, back. We're going to be performing all of our hits. But we're going to focus on four things. One, the Doves type was, of course, supposed to become Emery's upon Thomas's death. So a few days after, not technically wrong, Emery, but really too soon. You asked Annie to hand it over, and of course she couldn't, because she didn't have it, so you started legal proceedings. However, Annie and Emery didn't fight it out for any way near as long as Thomas had. They settled quite quickly out of court. But that doesn't bring back the doves, or patch up the emotional damage for either of them.

24:05The second thing that happened? Thomas had kept very detailed journals for his last four decades, and on the fourth anniversary of his death, Annie published them. And there was no mention of Emery. Plenty of detail about which lines of poetry had been printed in which ink. But no Emery. Nothing from all those years where you two hung out together at the socialist meetings and the printing scene parties. Nothing from all those family holidays in the neighbouring cottages. Nothing from all your good years or all the bad. Emery had been edited out of Thomas' life. Yes, they made it look like you hadn't existed.

24:44But their final years were all about you, so they clearly didn't forget you. A hole where a memory used to be is still a memory-shaped hole. You take the type away and you've still got the words it made. You take the words away and you've still got the impression they made. The third thing that happened. When Annie died four years after Thomas, her and Thomas' ashes were placed in urns in a wall at the end of their garden, backing onto the River Thames. Two years later, the river overflows. and their ashes were gulped up by the water. Thomas and Annie were reunited with the Doves type that had consumed so much of the last third of their lives.

25:25Everything must end, the memories we made. Perhaps the real friends were the ones we threw away. The fourth thing that happened? Emery, you tried to resurrect the Doves type. You hired Edward Prince, who had cut the original Doves, to remake it. But it was too late. By then, Edward Prince was in his late 70s. His eyes and hands could no longer do such small, fiddly work to such exact specifications. Well, maybe the real problem was you can't recreate a memory. So Doves Type remained drowned and dead for close to a century. Until, in 2010, type designer Robert Green decided to try remaking it. I'm a freelance graphic designer, I was in between jobs and I had nothing to do I might as well just redraw this typeface How hard can it be, you know?

26:24Famous last words He researched and drew and redrew the letters working off how they appeared on the pages printed by the Dubs press But from those he couldn't reconstruct the type exactly because every time the metal meets the page the ink leaves a slightly different shape on the paper It's like tracing around coastline You've got the coastline of the land when the tide is in, and then the tide goes out slightly. After working on it for three years, Robert released a digital version of Dove's Type. But he wasn't all that satisfied with it. It's only going to be an impression of an impression, your idealised version of something.

27:05Robert decided he needed to see the original Dove's Type for himself. and in 2014 he went looking for it in the River Thames. And beneath Hammersmith Bridge, at low tide, after only 20 minutes of searching for these tiny pieces of metal not much thicker than a matchstick, he found a lowercase v and then an i and an e. When you're handling something that nobody's touched for, in this case it was nearly 100 years, is like for a second, time collapses. It did feel like I just literally reached out and caught it as he dropped it. And that's a very strange feeling. Robert returned to the spot with a team of divers, and altogether they found 151 pieces of Dove's Type.

27:59Just a fraction of a full set, but there was enough for Robert to be able to see far more detail of the original letters and hone his designs. He added more characters, like the at sign they hadn't needed yet in 1900, and he made an alternative version of the lowercase y, because Emery had always found the design of the original one too aggressive. And Robert has released his updated version of Doves for public use, and anyone who buys it can use it for whatever they want. And this is exactly why Cobb and Sanderson threw it in the river. He didn't want it used for advertising and things that he didn't approve of.