99% Invisible - Doves Type

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

A legendary typeface, a spectacular friendship breakup, and one extremely committed act of revenge. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Here 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 Austwick, 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. They 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.

This 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 Glock Spiel and Emery by violin. Two 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 Emory 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. That's all right. Maybe one of you bought the other a drink. You 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 be each other's right 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. You 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. Emory, you had had a difficult childhood. You grew up in poverty, and you'd had to leave school, age 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. This 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, To a Perfect Friend, an Imperfect Souverneur. These words transform a piece of rubbish into an object with value. Souverneur is French for memory, and therefore all souvenirs must be imperfect. souvenir

We don't need reminders Because you're always near Really near Because Emory lived at number three Hammersmith Terrace And in 1897 Thomas and his family moved into number seven Down the Street

And half a mile east along the River Thames Emory 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. And even that wasn't close enough after at least a decade of friendship. In 1890, 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 told 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 The Doves 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. Emory, 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. I 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 and the Doves Presses 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. The 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 dove's 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. The Doves Press was a huge influence on typography and book design.

When the Doves Press printed Bibles, critics said, Oh, 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 biblie 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. Things started to go sour almost immediately. Who knows exactly what they said? Furious rouse or giving each other the cold shoulder? Thomas and Emery, you were not on the same page. All right, 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 Oh 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? Eating 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, Emory has onion breath. But here was the real point of contention. Emory, 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 Girl's first single,

Wannaby 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. Friendship never ends. Why would the spice girls lie? We thought we'd be each other's pal Until one of us die. I 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 Emory'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. Why? 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 gold stones But at least we've still got doves Yeah, at least we've still got doves right fellas One of the reasons Thomas and Emery'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. And 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 Dutch Doves 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. To 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 Emory, would continue to use the Doves type for the rest of his life. And upon his death, it would become Emery's.

It's a kind of a morbid deal, but it was a deal. In 1909, after seven years of wrangling, the Dobs 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 goes light, 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 type 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

Or they throw their engagement ring into a lake Whereas throwing away a whole tight face was a lot more time and effort. For once Thomas, you chose action over abstraction. You planned this for how long? Seven 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 apolloja does not mean an apology. It's a defense 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. Then 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 Doves type. Each 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. Night 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 dove's type And oh, then there would be the police and the newspapers and the courts and the shame. The shame. Twice 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 changed to autumn, changed 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. For five months, you kept making your trips to the bridge, and by the end of January 1917, you had drowned all the dark. Meld 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, So if you hadn't thrown a whole tight face 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. Is that really what you wanted? Is that the impression you wanted to leave? Thomas, 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 dove's type. On the 7th of September 1922, Thomas died peacefully in his bed in the attic of the dove's 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.

Okay, 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 dove's 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 anywhere 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. The 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's life. Yes, they made it look like you hadn't existed,

but 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's ashes were placed in urns in a wall at the end of their garden, backing onto the River Thames.

Two years later, the river overflowed 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. Everything must end. the memories we made perhaps the real friends were the ones we threw away The fourth thing that happened Emory, you tried to resurrect the dove's 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 Or maybe the real problem was you can't recreate a memory. So Dove's 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? Famous last word. He researched and drew and redrew the letters, working off how they appeared on the pages printed by the Doves 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 Doves type. But he wasn't all that such. satisfied with it.

It's only going to be an impression of an impression, your idealised version of something. Robert decided he needed to see the original Doves type for himself, and in 2014, he went looking for it in the River Tense. 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 low-smitter.

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, it's 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, just 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 why, 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 Cobbden Sanderson threw it in the river. He didn't want it used for advertising and things that he didn't approve of. He only wanted the finest literature through his lens of what the finest literature and poetry and philosophy was.

You know, he only ever wanted it used for that. nothing else. And of course you let it out into the world and people are going to use it for letters to their bank manager. But of course you put something out into the world, it's not yours anymore. There's nothing you can do about it. So sorry Thomas. We can now print what we want. Keep calm and carry on even though it's the wrong thought. Passive aggressive signs, posters of Live laugh, love, t-shirts for my stag weekend are eternal life for dubs. All those tiny monuments, two letters disappear. Impressions of your lives.

In perfect souvenir. Souvenirs was written, performed and produced by Helen Zaltzman and Martin Austwick, with Adrian Lebel on violin. It was a falling tree production for BBC Radio 4. After the break, Helen and I talk about the inspiration behind her live shows. So we're back with Helen Zaltzman. And I want to talk to you about this radio piece that's adapted from a live show of The Illusionist. And I want you to tell me about the creation of the live show, how you tell stories with music and sound that involve the audience.

And how do you think of it differently than when you're creating radio? I suppose because it's very different communicating with a video. bunch of people in a room versus via the internet over, it could be a long time period between me making something, them listening to it, whereas stage is very immediate, but also you can get away with more, like you don't have to have as many footnotes I feel in a stage production, although I did take care over the factual correctness of this, because I hate to be corrected. And someone did come to see the show a couple of years ago who works with Robert Green that found the typeface, and he said that was very accurate.

Nice. And I felt proud. Yeah. But usually a stage show, A, starts with a musical idea in my head, and B, is only written within 36 hours of the first performance. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, it's horrible. It's really horrible, Roman. How do I fix myself?

It's so bad. And then my husband, Martin, who plays the music, is like, I hate you so much. You always do this. And yet I know that he can pull it out the bag because it always happens. And why was this the right story to tell in the live context? I can't remember. I had pitched to an audio festival, resonate in Richmond, Virginia, that I wanted to do a stage performance where audience members played characters but using only a sound effect.

And I had read about this story around the same time in just as obscure a mailout. But I don't know why I put the two together. But the more I learned about it, the more fascinating I found it, not really because of the type, but because of the... The friendship breakdown, they really were very, very important friends to each other for more than a decade. And then it was quite a short period during which everything fell apart, like within two years. And then this immense fallout and the fact that you could hatch a revenge plan that took so many years to execute, I don't have the patience for that. My revenge plan would have to be within 36 hours.

36 hours. All creation and destruction has to happen within 36 hours. Right. I think that's enough time. I mean, one of the things that strikes me when you're thinking about creating musical accompaniment to a piece is the tantalizing aspect of having these two different characters who can be personified in music, kind of like Peter and the Wolf, you know. That was what I was thinking. I had pitched Peter and the Wolf, but it's about Edwardian type design. But when I say it starts with a musical idea, it's literally me in the shower walking around thinking, oh, suddenly a little four-line chorus has popped into my head.

And then if I tweak the words, that's where the emotional progression of the piece starts to form. Because I'm like, okay, so it starts here. And then it gets sadder, and then it gets angry, and then it gets very weird. Yeah, yeah. And that's all just tweaking a very silly little refrain. Yeah.

You know, one of the things that struck me most when I heard it is when you bring in interview tape, which happens very late in the piece, which normally for a radio piece, it happens very early to establish that this. Yeah, but that's that's true. There's certain fact pattern of the story itself necessitates that maybe the interview tape happens later. But, you know, normally you would interview some historian and their voice would be. be up top and they would be helping you tell it or something like this. Like it would be unusual for like 75% of the piece to be your voice and music and then somebody comes in, you know, and, um, and it's really striking itself as almost a piece of music to have the voice come in to me. Like I was, I was like into it when it found this new gear kind of. Oh, cool. It is, I suppose, now you explained it to me. A really strange thing to do and I wonder why I did it. But I think partly because documentaries have been made about this before. Yeah. With the type designer Robert Green and doing it

in that way where it is coming at it from the history of the type. And also, these guys are remembered for two things, one of which is being friends with William Morris and the other is this typeface going in the river. But they're not really remembered for other things that they did. And for the emotions that I found so compelling. Yeah, yeah. So I think for me, that was the root rather than just this happened then, and these were the people that they were running around with and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah.

Not that those things aren't important, but someone else had already done it. Right, right. It's a different level of investigation to talk about their emotions in this process. But then we only have these sources that have survived. So we have a lot of letters and diary entries from Thomas Copton Sanderson. we have some letters from Emory, but Thomas has had typically more control of the narrative because he was just much more prolific in expressing himself. And so for a lot of decades, people thought Emory was the jerk because he hadn't complained as much.

Got it, got it. There's just a very weird little incidental detail. Yeah, please. And something that I found very funny that I would like to investigate further is this is not the only typeface disposed of in the River Thames. There have been several. And I think there has got to be a better way of disposed. of two plus tons of metal. It's lead.

It seems like that's not where it should go. Is there a short story of other typefaces that ended up in the Thames that you know of? There was a contemporary of Copton Sonson and Walker called Charles Ricketts, who was an illustrator, and he had a printing press called the Vail Press from 1896 to 1904, whereupon a fire destroyed all their woodcuts, and he and his business colleagues decided to shut it down. and threw the type in the river. So I don't know if that's where Thomas got the idea from and thought, well, this would be a nice benediction to the River Thames,

whether he thought, what am I going to do, leave it on the curb? I can't do that. It's a good point. I mean, like, throwing things in river is a long history of the way in which you dispose things. You know what I mean? That's not unusual. It's just, I think it's unusual. It feels unusual when it comes to typefaces, I think.

Yes, because it is such a huge thing. so much effort. This is, it's so heavy. Yeah. It's hard to really understand because the pieces of type are tiny. They're like a matchstick thick and less long, but each of those is two grams. Sorry, I don't know what that is in old money. And then there's hundreds of thousands of those, which really adds up. Real effort. But then again, like, where else could you put it? If you really were trying to get rid of it, you know, like it's not like the garbage man comes along, takes it. Yeah, what do you do with two tons of lead? It's just a question. that in the 21st century, we still struggle to answer.

That's true. Can you melt it down and do something else with it? Do Etsy stuff? You probably do a lot of Etsy stuff. Yeah. Well, Helen Salsman, it's some fun to talk to you. Thank you very much for having me. Our interview with Helen Saltzman was produced by Jacob Medina Gleason.

Mixed by Martine Gansalice, music by Swan Real. Kathy, too, is our executive producer. Kurt Colestead is the digital director, Delaney Holstead. is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Baroube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Jonathan, Vivian Leigh, Loshamaddon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Tallinn and Rain Stradley, and Me, Roman Mars. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north, in the Pandora building, in Beautiful, Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as

our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.