Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - "Dangerously Near to Absolute Perfection"

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

In 1900, two friends in the flourishing Arts and Crafts Movement in London share a vision: to print the ultimate edition of the Bible. Together they create The Doves Press, and its unique font, Doves. But in their quest to make something beautiful, the friends spiral towards an act of incredible ugliness. For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Get ad-free episodes, plus an exclusive monthly bonus episode, to Cautionary Tales by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkinSubscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin I'm looking forward to getting together with Nate Silver and Maria Konikova of the Risky Business podcast to answer your questions. Nate and Maria are both journalists who moonlight as high stakes poker players. So maybe you'd like to ask about that? Perhaps you have a burning question about the economy? Politics? Human nature, board games. We will take a crack at answering anything. So please send your questions to tails at pushkin.fm. November 1916. The world has gone mad. Over in northern France, the Battle of the Somme has been raging. But here, in West London, an old man has been making his own crazy plans.

If I'm foolish, well, what can be more foolish than the whole world? He writes in his journal. My folly is of a light kind. It's true that what he's doing isn't as bad as trench warfare, but that is the lowest of low bars. Here he is now, limping through the fog and the darkness along the north bank of the River Thames, struggling with the weight of the wooden box he's carrying. Look at him. He's nervous, looking around, terrified that he might be stopped by a policeman,

that they might ask him about his heavy burden. There are plenty of police around. After all, there's a war on. Imagine if he was caught. He'd imagined it himself many times. The police, the public, the newspapers. What a weird business it is, beset with perils and panics. I have to see that no one is near or looking. Yes, don't look too closely or he'll get nervous.

Keep your distance. Take your time. There he goes, down the riverside walk, towards Hammersmith Bridge, that elegant late Victorian suspension bridge across the river. Watch him heave that box up onto the railings. What's he doing? If you missed it, not to worry, he'll be back tomorrow.

Maybe even later tonight. This is not a moment of madness. It's a long-term project. Hitherto I have escaped detection. But in the vista of coming nights, I see innumerable possibilities lurking in dark corners and it will be a miracle if I escape them all. If anyone figures out what he's doing it will ruin him. But what is he doing? I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. To understand the old man and his folly, we need to go back almost three decades further,

to a lecture given at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in London in November 1888. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was all about simple, beautiful design, and above all, respectful of the skill of the artisan. In the audience that evening were some of the greats of the arts and crafts movement. The lecturer was nervous. His name was Emery Walker, and he wasn't used to public speaking, especially not in front of such a distinguished crowd. But his friend Thomas Cobden Sanderson, the man who had given the Arts and Crafts movement its name, had urged him to speak. So Emery did.

Thomas Cobden Sarderson and Emery Walker made an unlikely couple of friends. Thomas Cobden Sarderson had gone to Cambridge, trained to be a fancy lawyer, and married an heiress. Emery Walker was working class, the son of a coachmaker who dropped out of school at the age of 13 because his family needed him to get a job. There's a wonderfully contrasting pair of portrait photographs of the two.

Walker has a hard-wearing tweed three-piece suit. it looks as tough as barbed wire, and he looks like he sleeps in it. His face with bushy moustache is care-lined, cheekbones prominent. From under the brim of a black fedora, his eyes stare, almost haunted, and he's clutching a cat, like he's about to crush its rib cage with his bare hands. And Thomas Copden Sanderson? He's wearing a big white floppy beret. So huge it looks like somebody accidentally dropped the raw dough for a pizza on his head. Instead of

a tie, he has a ribbon at his throat. And he's wearing an artist's gown, like a preschooler heading for the paint box. An effete artist and a hard man who's seen some hard times. That's how they seem. Emory Walker may not have gone to Cambridge, but that evening at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, he knew what he was talking about. He'd made a career in printing and photography, with a particular expertise in reproducing images on the printed page. Despite his nerves,

he was rising to the occasion. Emery's talk was a magisterial history of type design, printing, and illustration from its very beginning in the 1400s. In a darkened room, he projected slides showing the printed page through the ages, and highlighting the way in which early printing existed alongside and in harmony with manuscripts. Photographically enlarging the images, Emery was able to show the exquisite craft of 15th century type designers from Venice, the centre of the new printing industry in the 1470s. Then Emery showed a sad decline. After just a few decades, the quality of printing started to fall apart. The printed page could be beautiful,

but it could also be cheap and mass produced. And printers increasingly favored the cheap over the beautiful. Nobody had ever seen such images projected in a lecture, and the content was as important as the format. Emory Walker was telling the great arts and crafts masters a story that echoed their deepest convictions. A story about crude mass production crowding out elegance and honest craft. With his enchanting slides and the tragic tale they told, Emery Walker cast a spell. The most prominent member of the audience fell under that enchantment.

He was William Morris, Oxford educated, wealthy, the creator of gorgeous floral textiles and wallpapers that are the epitome of arts and crafts. Inspired, William Morris himself decided to set up a printing press. A printing press that would reclaim the book itself as a work of art. Morris established what became known as Kelmscott Press. And he did nothing without first asking the advice of Emery Walker. Kelmscott Press books were collector's items as soon as they were made.

One of Emery's contributions had been to help with the typeface. Based on a Venetian type, Emery photographed the Venetian book from the 1470s, enlarging the letters so they could form the basis for a beautiful dense black type called golden type. It looked almost medieval and it was undoubtedly beautiful. But then William Morris died. What now? Thomas Cobden Sarderson, like William Morris, had fallen in love with the idea of making

beautiful books. But he had a different vision for what a beautiful book could be. While Morris was harking back to medieval manuscripts. Cobden Sanderson wanted something with more space on the page. A simpler layout and a lighter typeface. He thought William Morris had made a mistake in making a blacker, heavier version of Venetian type. Better to get something finer, more like the original. As one critic put it, William Morris's books were full of wine. Early Venetian pages were full of light.

Cobden Sanderson wanted to make books that were full of light. Cobden Sanderson shared his dreams with his journal. I must, before I die, create the type for today of the book beautiful and actualise it. Paper, ink, writing, printing, ornament and binding. I will learn to write, to print and to decorate. An awe-inspiring, daunting project. A project perhaps best undertaken in company. And so Cobden Sanderson approached Emery Walker, the man who he had inspired and who had inspired him in turn. But Walker was more than a colleague.

He was a dear friend. Walker's family lived at three Hammersmith Terrace, Cobden Sanderson's at seven Hammersmith Terrace. Their families became so close that they rented a pair of summer cottages in the country so that when they went on summer holidays they'd still be together. When one of his early experiments went awry, with an element printed upside down, Cobden Sanderson gave it as a memento to Emery Walker, with the inscription, "'To a perfect friend, an imperfect souvenir."

And the friends shared a political vision, as well as an aesthetic one. They saw each other regularly, not only at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, but at the Hammersmith Socialist Society. They believed in the dignity of honest work, the fundamental equality of every person, on the importance of sharing prosperity. Their perfect partnership would be called the Dove's Press. It would produce some works of astonishing beauty and an act of incredible ugliness.

Cautionary Tales will be back after the break. What could be more fun than setting up a new creative enterprise with your closest friend? Late in October 1899, Cobden Sanderson was excitedly talking to his journal again. Today, Mother and I have been tidying up stairs in the attics, where in a few days we hope to begin as printers. By mother. He didn't mean his mother. He meant the mother of his children. Annie Cobden Sanderson had been a huge influence on Thomas. She gave him her family name, Cobden, and her family inheritance, which was a solid source of funds. Most importantly,

she urged him to quit being a lawyer and give himself over to his real passion, arts and crafts. Annie was putting up all the money to pay for this new business. Emory and Thomas were supplying, well, their expertise and enthusiasm. Together, the three of them would create the Doves Press. Which we hope to make as famous as the Kelmscott Press. Won't it be fun? A few days later, he added, Soon Mr Walker and myself, sitting on high stools, will begin printing. Isn't that fun?

Quite a new business. We are wondering what great book we shall begin with. Perhaps it will be the Bible. Oh to be in love. Cobden Sanderson was in love, it seems, with Emory Walker and the book Beautiful and the Dove's Press. But the first flush of love does not always last. The first page of the Dove's Bible hits like a divine thunder clap. In the beginning fills the first line, big and red and bold, all caps like a tabloid newspaper headline decades ahead of its time.

Even bolder, the eye of in the beginning runs all the way down the page alongside the block of text, a strong red vertical line. Stunning, brave, so beautiful, it is one of the most celebrated pages in the history of printing. After the shock of that bold red eye, the deeper beauty emerges from the typeface, which was called, simply, Doves. Every Doves Press book was set in the same font, Doves Type, 16 point. There were no illustrations, and only a few flourishes, such as that red vertical. The first volume of the Dove's Bible was published in 1903. But the effect is shockingly clear and modern. Like the Venetian masterpieces before them, Dove's press pages really were

full of light. Dove's type was a collective effort. Thomas Cobden Sanderson gave aesthetic direction, but Emery Walker had been the inspiration. As well as overseeing production and photographically enlarging the work of the Venetian masters – who of course were themselves part of the collaboration. An employee of Walkers actually drew the design and a brilliant craftsman cut the tiny type punches. And who paid for it all? Annie Cobden Sanderson. The result of this collective effort, Doves, is often said to be the most beautiful type in the world. It's elegant, with clean lines and subtle serifs, and just the faintest suggestion of the human at work.

One writer described it as slightly rickety, as though somebody had knocked into the compositor's plate and jiggled every letter almost imperceptibly. It is unique. Nobody really knows why Emery and Thomas fell out. A family friend later recalled of Walker, he was the kindest and gentlest of men, and I always found it hard to believe that he could have had a row with anyone. Perhaps the problem was that the two men had different expectations. Emery Walker hadn't married into money. He had other businesses to run.

He knew printing, he had sourced the machinery, found the right workers, dealt with the practicalities of setting up Dove's Press. But then he trusted Thomas to handle the day-to-day printing. Thomas Copden Sanderson may have joyfully imagined Emery at his elbow as they sat together on high stools, printing the book beautiful. Emery Walker had other things to do. Walker was a professional printer. He thought it unnecessary to check every single sheet, explains Robert Green, a type designer.

Cobden Sanderson was not a professional printer, but he was a perfectionist. This was the problem between the two men. Cobden Sanderson seems to have resented Emory Walker's absence. But then again, when Walker did offer an opinion, Cobden Sanderson was outraged. In 1902, Cobden Sanderson set out his grievances in a letter to Walker. You objected to the adoption of the original edition of Paradise Lost for our edition. You objected to the spelling. And you objected to the capitals in the text. To my arranging of in the beginning and to the long initial I.

And said it will never do. You objected to the position of the title of the first book of Genesis on the left-hand page and said it was hateful. You objected to the table of contents. And only the other day you objected to my arrangement of Isaac's address to his twelve sons." He never sent the letter. Instead he sat simmering with frustration, but determined to finish the work on the great

Dove's Press books they had begun together. The small team of printers and typesetters at Dove's Press worked on nothing but the Bible for three years. The result, said one critic, was dangerously near to absolute perfection. While Dove's Press was winning plaudits from the critics, it wasn't making money. The Bible Project was popular. All 500 copies sold out in advance, but there was a limited market for incredibly beautiful yet expensive books. The business only kept going because Annie was subsidising it from her inheritance, but

that inheritance couldn't last. And all three of them had reason to be frustrated. Annie, because she was effectively bankrolling Thomas' hobby. Thomas, because he was doing most of the work. And Emery, because he could see so much potential in the doves' style and the doves' typeface, if only they could use it for longer print runs of more affordable books. Four years after his unsent rant, Thomas Cobden Sanderson finally wrote to Emory Walker to explain that the relationship was over. My dear Walker, now that the Bible, our great work, is finished, and as moreover the whole

work of the press does in fact fall upon me. I should like to dissolve our partnership, and to become solely responsible for the press. It was agreed in the event of dissolution you would be entitled to a fount of type for your own use. This I would ask you to exchange for some equivalent, as I do not think that either of us would like to see two presses at work with the type which has been hitherto unique. Ah yes, that was a sticking point. Cobden Sanderson touched Dove's type every day, obsessed over the perfection of the books he was typesetting and printing, and hated the idea that Walker might take the Dove's typeface and use it to make something

unworthy. He might print advertisements, or use it for product packaging. Who knew? In truth, Walker had done as much as anyone to champion the book Beautiful, and as much as anyone to create the book Beautiful, and as much as anyone to create Dove's Type. It seemed most likely that he would use Dove's Type to print elegant but affordable books. There was no technical reason why both men couldn't have a copy of the type, but Cobden

Sanderson couldn't bear the thought of Emory Walker using it, and Emory Walker insisted that he had every right to do so. Walker may have been the kindest and gentlest of men, but he wasn't a pushover. If he didn't fight, he wrote to a friend in 1909, the only alternative is to be a passive resistor and allow him to despoil me, and that I don't like. wrote to a friend in 1909, the only alternative is to be a passive resistor and allow him to despoil me, and that I don't like. A few weeks later, he sued Copden Sanderson. Copden Sanderson shared his reaction to that news

with his journal. He wasn't afraid of being fined or even imprisoned. For nothing on earth will now induce me to part with the type. I am what he does not appear to realise, a visionary and a fanatic. And against a visionary and a fanatic, he will beat himself in vain. Their mutual friends despaired of the situation, but eventually one of them, Sydney Cockrell, managed to broker a compromise. Thomas Cobden Sanderson was 68 years old.

Emory Walker was over a decade younger. What if Cobden Sanderson had exclusive use of the Dove's type until he died, and then the metal type and the right to use it would pass to Emory Walker? Cockerell's idea was a fudge, and it was not what Walker had been promised. But reluctantly, Walker agreed. He might not have done so had he realised what Thomas Cobden Sanderson was planning. Thomas had already written to the company who had manufactured the font a decade before. They had in their store rooms up in Edinburgh the punches and matrices for doves. The matrices were moulds to make

more copies of the doves type. The were moulds to make more copies of the dove's type. The punches were tools to make more matrices. As long as they existed, dove's type would never die. "'Take the punches and matrices out of storage,' wrote Copden Sanderson, and sent them to me. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break. Thomas Cobden Sanderson was capable of enraged outbursts of destruction. One day, for example, he was binding a book and realised the leather for the binding didn't fit. Here's what happened next, in his own words.

In a burst of rage, he took the knife and cut the slips and tore the covers and boards off and tossed them to one side. Then in a very ecstasy of rage seized one side again, tore the leather off the board and cut it and cut it and slashed it with a knife. Then I was quite calm again. That was a fit of white-hot rage. But now Cobden Sanderson would act in cold blood. His plan was simple. He had promised that after he died, Emery Walker would get the Dove's type, but he never had any intention of fulfilling that promise. Instead, he would destroy the type utterly. That was no easy task. When Walker and Cobden-Sanderson referred to a fount of Dove's type, or what

we'd call a font, they were referring to a set of metal letter slugs, sufficient to typeset pages of print. That meant several copies of each letter, perhaps dozens of copies, as well as copies of punctuation marks and other symbols. All things considered, a font of type was a serious assemblage of heavy metal. And Thomas Cobden Sarderson planned to bequeath that heavy metal to the River Thames. So there we are, in the freezing fog of November 1916, watching a stubborn, stubborn old man shuffling from the Dove's Press Bindery

to half mile or so to the green and gold towers of Hammersmith Bridge. He's convinced that the police will stop him, that there will be a national scandal. Of course, nobody has any particular reason to stop an old man with a heavy burden. And if they did stop him and find that his wooden toolbox was packed not with tools, but with slugs of metal type,

then so what? Cobden Sanderson had been planning this for years. The week before Easter 1913, he'd made several trips to the bridge, carrying some of the punches and matrices that would let Emery Walker make his own font of the dove's type. At the end of each trip, the same scene. Cobden Sanderson looked west, towards the dove's press building itself and the setting sun. Then he hurled the matrices into the river. He thus controlled the only font of Dove's type that would ever exist and would use it to print

the last few Dove's Press books. Now, late in 1916, he would finish what had started by destroying that font. But the sheer scale of the task was incredible. There was over a ton of metal type at Dove's Press. And Thomas Cobden Sanderson, now 76 years old, had to carry every ounce of it to the bridge and throw it into the river.

His journals vividly record the act and give no hint that he ever had doubts. I have to see that no one is near or looking. Then over the parapet, a box full, and then the audible and visible splash. One night, I'd nearly cast my type into a boat, another danger which unexpectedly shot from under the bridge. He perfected the project, however, adapting his toolbox to the task.

At the bridge I crossed the other side, take a stealthy look round, and if no one is in sight, I heave up the box to the parapet, release the sliding lid, and let the type fall sheer into the river. The work of a moment. He had plenty of opportunity to practice. Marianne Tidcombe, who wrote the definitive history of Dove's Press, estimates that the old man could not have carried more than 15 pounds of type on each half mile journey to the bridge. To carry the full tonne and more of metal would have taken at least 170 furtive trips. In any case, his journals show that the whole business took almost six months.

He had plenty of time to stop and reconsider. He never did. At the end of it all, the most beautiful type in the world was gone. Just so an old man could be sure that nobody else would ever be able to use it. The final publication of the Dove's Press was a catalogue of all the books the press had published over its 16 years of operation. On the last page, the last page ever printed by Dove's Press, Thomas Cobden Sanderson boasted of his deed. To the bed of the River Thames, the river on whose banks I have printed all my printed

books, I, the Dove's Press, bequeath the Dove's Press fount of type. The punches, matrices, and the type in use at the Dove's Press at the time of my death. Was he serious? It wasn't clear. But their mutual friend, Sidney Cockrell, feared the worst. He wrote to Cobden Sanderson, telling him that he'd made a terrible mistake. I believe that you will come to see that your sacrifice to the River Thames was neither a worthy nor an honourable one. Cockrell was wrong.

The historian Marion Tidcombe wrote, Cobden Sanderson never regretted it. Indeed, he took delight in it and found comedy in the tragedy. Emory Walker eventually became Sir Emory Walker, a pillar of the art and design community. His house has been preserved as a museum of arts and crafts. The playwright George Bernard Shaw called him an almost reprehensibly amiable man. The architect Philip Webb called him the universal Samaritan whose services were laid on like water. The chief compositor at Dove's Press said that he carried everywhere with him an atmosphere of genial friendliness. Thomas Cobden Sanderson had a different description. In a letter to his lawyers, he once wrote, Mr Emery Walker is and always has been, perhaps must be, a tradesman.

It's a line that says more about Cobden Sanderson than about Walker. In 1922, five years after destroying the Dove's type, Thomas Cobden Sanderson died. Emery Walker asked Annie to hand over the type, and when she could not, he sued. It wasn't so much for compensation, what compensation could there be, but over the principle that Cobden Sanderson did not create the Dove's Type by himself, and the Dove's Type was not his to destroy. Annie had to pay, money that after years of subsidising the press, she could hardly afford. Both she and Walker, and indeed the whole world, had been impoverished by the stubbornness of a man who was now beyond atonement.

Annie died a few years later, and her ashes were placed next to his, in an urn in the garden wall of the house where they lived together, and where the Dove's Press had operated, next door to Emery Walker. Soon after, the River Thames burst its banks. The flood waters carried both Annie and Thomas away. Obsession is a strange thing. Almost a century after Thomas sacrificed Dove's type to the spirit of the River Thames, another type designer, Robert Green, went down to the foreshore at low tide underneath Hammersmith Bridge and poked around in the shingle. Cobden Sanderson had become obsessed with destroying the dove's type.

Robert Green had become obsessed with resurrecting it. At first he did what Emery Walker had done all those years before, photographing and enlarging the printed pages, and trying to discern the shape of the metal that had produced those inked characters. In digital form, Green drew and redrew doves over 120 times. The obsession with the typist caused a lot of problems. When you're up all night trying to get the right curve in the leg of an R and you're spending three and a half hours on it, it doesn't go down too well with your wife. Annie Cobden Sanderson would have known the feeling.

I'm not really sure why I got started. In the end, it took over my life. But perhaps there's no mystery. Green couldn't get over the contrast between the beauty of the type and the ugliness of Cobden Sanderson's long act of destruction. As Green says, he claimed to believe in beauty, claimed to be a socialist, yet the most beautiful thing he created he doesn't want to share, and he decides to throw it in the river rather than share it with the world. There's only so far you can get by copying the inked letters on a page though. Everyone told Green that the dove's type had never been found, but he wondered, had

anyone really ever looked for it? Which is why he found himself turning over pebbles under Hammersmith Bridge. And there it was, a letter V, still in good shape despite 98 years being tossed around underwater. He found two more pieces within 20 minutes. With the help of professional divers, Green has recovered a total of 150 pieces. Based on the recovered type and his own obsessive redraftings, Robert Green has now issued a digital version of Dove's type, something that anyone can use for a modest fee. He's donating half of the definitive scholarly history of the

affair. sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos Sanjuan at Brain Audio. Ben Nadaph Haferi edited the scripts. The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guthridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembra, Sarah Jupp, Marceya Monroe, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,

Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey and Owen Miller. Corortionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Beren.