Tim Harford (34:13)
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 they 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, Emory 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 Doves 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 Sanderson 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 Doves Press bindery the 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 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 Emory Walker make his own font of the Doves type. At the end of each trip, the same scene, Cobden Sanderson looked west towards the Doves 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 Doves Press books. Now, late in 1916, he would finish what he'd started by destroying that font. But the sheer scale of the task was incredible. There was over a ton of metal tons pipe at Doves Press, and Thomas COBBEN 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 cross to 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 Doves 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 ton 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 Doves 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 Doves 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 Doves Press at the time of my death. Was he serious? It wasn't clear, but their mutual friend Sydney Cockerell 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. Cockerell was wrong. The historian Marion Tidcombe wrote Cobden Sanderson never regretted it. Indeed, he took delight in it and found comedy in the tragedy. Emery 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 Doves 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. Emory 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 doves 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 Doves press had operated next door to Emery Walker. Soon after the River Thames burst its banks, the flood waters carried both Annie and Tom Thomas away. Obsession is a strange thing. Almost a century after Thomas sacrificed doves 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 Greene had become obsessed with resurrecting it. At first, he did what Emory 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 type has 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. Greene 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 Greene has now issued a digital version of Doves Type, something that anyone can use for a modest fee. He's donating half of the profits to the Emory Walker Museum. Marion Tidcombe's book the Doves Press is the definitive scholarly history of the affair. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at Tim Harford. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilly. 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 San Juan at Brainaudio. Ben Nadaff Hafsa edited the scripts. The show features the voice talents of Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Masaya Munro, 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 Brodie, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference to us. 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