Long Thought Lost To The Deep Silty Riverbed, A Storied Arts & Crafts Typeface... Rises -- And Echoes The Words, In A River Cut By Ancient Floods... [Yes, A Tangent]

I was put in mind of this story, which I saw only last week -- by what will likely be the overnight flooding of a certain river, near Nashville, Tennessee -- and how the rivers run through. . . all of us, truly.

So here it is -- not life science, per se -- but more the history of art. . . recovered. [Which is, after all -- some measure of the life of all of us, recorded for eternity.]

Well over a century ago, now. . . two partners had a falling out over whether one was being "swindled" by the other, over some small rights-payments, for an enigmatic-but-beautiful leaden typeface the two had designed several decades earlier -- in London.

And so, one of them tossed every single tangible, leaded bit of the proprietary face. . . into the muddy Thames River, near Fleet Street, off the Hammersmith Bridge one night.

While many printed paper books (and even bibles, from the 1910s and 1920s) still preserve what the font looked like when struck, no versions of the molded lead dies remained. It was indeed -- thought lost, to the raindrops, under the rocks, from the basement of time -- in that ancient riverbed.

Then in 2014 -- a century on, an enterprising art historian got to work, sifting the Thames. . . in just the right spots (do go read it all!):

. . .With its extra-wide capital letters, diamond shaped punctuation and unique off-kilter dots on the letter “i,” Doves Type became the press’s hallmark, surpassing fussier typographic attempts by their friend and sometime collaborator, William Morris.

The letterforms only existed as a unique 16 pt edition, meaning that when Cobden-Sanderson decided to “bequeath” every single piece of molded lead to the Thames, he effectively destroyed any prospect of the typeface ever being printed again. That might well have been the case, were it not for several individuals and a particularly tenacious graphic designer.

Robert Green first became fascinated with Doves Type in the mid-2000s, scouring printed editions and online facsimiles, to try and faithfully redraw and digitize every line. In 2013, he released the first downloadable version on typespec, but remained dissatisfied. In October 2014, he decided to take to the river to see if he could find any of the original pieces. . . .

And so. . . as other rivers likely leapt their banks this evening, what treasures lost to pre-civil war Tennessee. . . might be washed onto the otherwise dry flats? We shall soon possibly. . . see. Onward, grinning. . . .

नमस्ते