The Doves Type is a celebrated metal typeface created for the Doves Press in London around 1900. Its co-creator, Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, later threw the type into the River Thames to stop his former business partner from inheriting it. After more than a century underwater, recovered pieces have now been used to print a book again.
In June 2026, the University of York announced that 53 recovered pieces had been catalogued, loaned to its Thin Ice Press and returned to a working printing press. The small group of letters links a famous dispute in British design history with a very physical form of modern recovery.
Why was the Doves Type created?
The Doves Press was established in Hammersmith in 1900 by bookbinder and printer Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson and engraver Emery Walker. Their ambition belonged to the Arts and Crafts tradition: make books whose paper, proportions, ink and letterforms worked together as a complete object.
The press’s type was based on Renaissance Venetian letterforms. It became closely associated with the five-volume Doves Bible, a work admired for its restrained pages, generous spacing and the absence of decorative illustration. The drama of the later dispute has sometimes overshadowed the type’s original purpose: to create calm, highly readable pages through craft rather than ornament.
Why was the Doves Type thrown into the Thames?
The partnership dissolved in 1909. Under their agreement, Cobden-Sanderson could continue using the metal type during his lifetime, after which ownership would pass to Walker. Cobden-Sanderson did not want that to happen.
During evening trips to Hammersmith Bridge in 1916, he secretly dropped the type into the Thames in batches. The act destroyed the working supply and turned a commercial disagreement into one of typography’s most durable legends.
Thousands of individual sorts—the small metal pieces carrying a letter or punctuation mark—were lost. Their exact resting places were affected by tides, mud, redevelopment and the passage of time.
How were pieces of the type recovered?
The Thames foreshore periodically exposes objects deposited across centuries of London life. Searching it, usually under a permit and with strict rules, is known as mudlarking.
According to the University of York, Angus McArthur of the York Ghost Merchants recovered 53 pieces connected with the Doves Type. The pieces were catalogued and loaned to Thin Ice Press, the university’s working letterpress studio.
Recovery does not recreate the complete font. Fifty-three sorts are only a fragment of what once existed, and a single printed page can require many repeated copies of common letters. Their value lies in their identity, survival and ability to make a small number of authentic impressions.
What was printed with the recovered letters?
Thin Ice Press used the original metal pieces in a chapbook by writer Lydia Kennedy titled The Marker Committee. The collection explores fragmentation and loss, and the final letters of a poem called “Doves” were printed with the recovered type.
A limited-edition broadside was also produced, and the work was launched during the York Festival of Ideas. It was the first reported use of the recovered material to print a book in roughly 110 years.
Why does the return of the type matter?
Digital revivals can imitate the visible shape of an old typeface, but original metal carries evidence that a digital outline cannot: casting, wear, corrosion, pressure and the tiny variations of a physical object. Ink pressed from a recovered sort records both a letter and the object’s journey.
The project is also a neat example of experimental heritage. The type is not only displayed behind glass; it is studied by using it for the purpose for which it was made. That approach can reveal practical details about spacing, impression and durability while keeping the surviving material under controlled care.
Can the original Doves Type be used for a whole new book?
Not with the 53 recovered pieces alone. A complete setting would require far more letters and repeated characters. Modern type or other printing methods must provide the surrounding text. That limitation is part of the story: the surviving pieces work as material witnesses rather than a fully restored font.
Source
This article summarises published historical and project information; further cataloguing may refine details about individual recovered sorts.