Comments on: 1916.tiff: Recovering the Doves Type

1916.tiff: Recovering the Doves Type

scruss — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 05:57:18 -0800

"I went on to the foreshore when the tide was out, looked around the riverbed and found three pieces within 20 minutes."
(The Doves Type, previously.)

By: Dr Dracator

Dr Dracator — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 06:47:21 -0800

Cool post, needs the mudlark tag.

By: exogenous

exogenous — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 07:52:34 -0800

font. late Old English: from Latin fons, font- 'spring, fountain,' occurring in the ecclesiastical Latin phrase fons or fontes baptismi 'baptismal water(s).'

By: Slinga

Slinga — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 08:02:29 -0800

I wonder if they were using a metal detector or just scrounging around for it. I would think a detector would pick up a lot more of it.

By: xedrik

xedrik — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 08:04:40 -0800

This is what it sounds like when doves type.

By: infini

infini — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 08:13:07 -0800

*dumps 1760 lbs on xedrik*

By: BlueHorse

BlueHorse — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 08:18:50 -0800

Holy cow, what a fantastic story. This would make a super interesting book. Im not a typeaholic like some here are, but I was absolutely fascinated.

By: wenestvedt

wenestvedt — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 08:31:39 -0800

What a lovely typeface! I worked in prepress for years and saw some truly ugly letterforms. As in, "I can't hear what you are saying because the shapes are so distracting." I think these are soothing and graceful and cool. I wish I could write something that they would fit. :7)

By: Thing

Thing — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 08:32:32 -0800

font. late Old English: from Latin fons, font- 'spring, fountain,' occurring in the ecclesiastical Latin phrase fons or fontes baptismi 'baptismal water(s).' Interestingly, a different word.

By: acb

acb — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 09:28:07 -0800

I wonder whether this really was the first time any of Doves had been found in a century, or whether other pieces had been picked up over the preceding decades and have circulated through junk markets. Perhaps there are some Doves letterforms sitting on mantelpieces or in collages on the walls of quirky bars or sitting in grimy trays in flea markets in Northamptonshire or somewhere, their seller and browsers alike unaware of their significance.

By: Devonian

Devonian — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 09:46:38 -0800

Font (and fount) have different etymologies for their two meanings - font (the watery sort) comes from fount, which is a 16th century back-formation from fountain (as in mountain-mount), which is from the Latin, fontanus, a form of the word for spring. . Font (and fount) meaning type font, comes from fondre, a form of middle French for 'melt', because type comes from molten metal. Same root as fondue. Yum. Dove is a nice typeface, and I'm glad it's back with us, if a bit uncertain why the version recreated before the find needed to be tweaked. Surely there's enough matter extant that's printed in the face? Still the Thames is a great place for finds. Things don't get washed out to sea very much, but they do get tumbled up in the tides, so there's always a fresh crop of all sorts going back to prehistory. And there are rules, but you can freely walk along much of the foreshore looking for surface objects. It is addictive.

By: scruss

scruss — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 10:50:32 -0800

> Cool post, needs the mudlark tag. done!

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 12:18:25 -0800

> I'm glad it's back with us, if a bit uncertain why the version recreated before the find needed to be tweaked. In the notes for the face, the designer says one of his primary resources were low-res (72dpi, blown-up) scans of original Doves editions. With enough work, this would be sufficient to fix the proportions of the letters and their spacing*, but it still amounts to trying to determine precise dimensions from severely de-rezed, antialiased images of ink on paper that'd bled and smeared slightly from the printing process -- and made from type which themselves are as likely as not to be a mix of characters that are near the end of their useful life (distorted from having been mashed against platen hundreds of times) and characters that have been freshly recast from matrix. Having the lead at hand means he can review his original guesses regarding curves and stroke widths with much greater accuracy, and having done so decide whether he'd gotten close enough to the original to be done with the project. *(It's a kind of brute-force thing, but you can do this simply by replicating the source text with your own font; if, after hundreds of words, all line breaks are identical to the original and just as well-positioned, it's reasonable to assume you've got the letterspacing and most kerning pairs dialed in.)

By: zompist

zompist — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 13:27:55 -0800

Neat! And it's a really pretty font. Here's a closer image.

By: Helga-woo

Helga-woo — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 14:07:12 -0800

I do stuff on the Thames foreshore, archaeology though, not mudlarking. When I first read about this, before Christmas, I was surprised when they said none had ever been found. I know mudlarks have found type before, but I don't know if it was in that area. And although the foreshore is eroding badly in places, things don't move around that much. I guess they had just not thought to ask or look. Search for London Mudlark on Facebook, she posts an amazing assortment of finds that she and others have found. As Devonian says, there are rules, you can't just wander up with a metal detector and a shovel, but get a licence and stick to the rules and you'll be good. Even better if you get in touch with one of the mudlarking groups.

By: Devonian

Devonian — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 15:15:46 -0800

Ah, thanks for that. I went and found the notes on the original recreation, and see that he did what I was about to ask next: "But why didn't he go to the British Library and pull all the Doves books?". He did - "but wasn't allowed to photograph them." Which is a shame, as the British Library has now changed its policy on that and you are allowed to freely photograph books (albeit they suggest that you restrict yourself to "around 10 percent" of a work to qualify under faire use rules). Even ten percent of a large sample will provide a lot of characters. However, this is nowhere near as romantic and obviously correct a move as going to the river to find the actual type. (I do wonder about using some of the astro-photography averaging techniques that combine multiple images of the same object to increase resolution and decrease variation. Is stargazing an apt companion for font archaeology? Peering back in time at a splendid event that enriches today? Perhaps so.)

By: BiggerJ

BiggerJ — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 18:15:34 -0800

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Sat, 07 Feb 2015 22:05:38 -0800

What a thrillingly weird question mark!

By: Just this guy, y'know

Just this guy, y'know — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 04:17:57 -0800

I cycle past the Dove and under Hammersmith Bridge most days, and I'd read about the Dove type before. I too had been pondering going and having a look for it, but, I guess like everyone else had assumed that people had searched and not found it. Shoulda gone and checked last summer.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 07:22:57 -0800

There's likely to be plenty of lead still there, even if the easiest pickings are gone -- there were tens of thousands of pieces dumped. (I'll defer to Londoners to tell you whether it's a good idea to try.) The designer isn't going to benefit much by putting effort into collecting more pieces; he might not have a complete set but any further efforts is more likely going to pad the collection of characters and figures he already has, less likely to add any new finds. And as his notes state, the lead pieces helped inform some of the refinements but the extant printed pieces were ultimately better arbiters, due to the idiosyncrasies of Dove's printing process. He benefits, at least, that The Dove Type was only cast in 16pt; he wouldn't have to worry about how larger and smaller sizes varied in shape and counter.

By: tavella

tavella — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 14:29:34 -0800

While mudlarking as a profession seems to have died out, or at least been looked on as illegitimate, by the time he dumped the type, it's been carried on recreationally ever since. So if he found three pieces on the actual foreshore in just one pass, I'd bet hundreds, if not thousands, have been picked up over the years.

By: bystander

bystander — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 19:43:18 -0800

Is it that difficult to get hold of one of the printed books? Surely there are many in libraries and private collections everywhere? I can't imagine an antiquarian dealer not allowing a keen typographer to scan some pages at high resolution. And considering the time that has been devoted, volumes can be purchased not *that* expensively: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Doves-Press-DRAMATIS-PERSONAE-Robert-Browning-1910-Signed-Anne-Cobden-Sanderson-/400778636298?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5d5044ac0a Its a nice story, but how does access to the moveable type provide accuracy to a digital font that access to the printed pages would not?

By: scruss

scruss — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 01:53:58 -0800

Related link from frimble's deleted FPP: The Gorgeous Typeface That Drove Men Mad and Sparked a 100-Year Mystery.