9 ms·

Remnants of a legendary typeface have been rescued from the Thames

433 points by _emacsomancer_ 2y ago

rudyfink 2y ago
That's cool. I admit hearing that story and thinking, "Is that how it happened? could a diver find it?" Apparently, they could! Great work on someone seeing it through.
starkparker 2y ago
I remember the earlier story about the disposal and Robert Green's obsession with reviving it back in 2013 in The Economist[1]—at that time, "Intrepid fans have occasionally tried to recover pieces of the type from the river, but no one has ever found any"—so it's good to hear that the story didn't end there. [1]: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2013/12/19/the-fight-over-the-doves https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2013/12/19/the-... (paywalled; https://archive.is/XfK1x https://archive.is/XfK1x)
kens 2y ago
The recovery of the Doves typeface from the Thames was discussed on HN in 2015, so this story goes way back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307
- beardyw 2y ago
  Yes, very old news.
  - 33282334 2y ago
    hek free
- dang 2y ago
  Added to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40271786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40271786. Thanks!
neilv 2y ago
> “It is not that unusual to find pieces of type in the river,” Sandy said. “Particularly around Fleet Street, where newspaper typesetters would throw pieces in the water when they couldn’t be bothered to put them back in their cases. Some assistant being lazy, or rushing to "finish" a task? Or sorts that broke, or were worn out, and it was normal to toss things into the river? Or a ritual? (Say, toss a sort into the river for the first page an apprentice sets, or when there's a press failure, or for superstition after printing very bad news?)
- timeon 2y ago
  > it was normal to toss things into the river? It was normal. Rivers were used for dumping the garbage. In some places they still are. I know about instances in Europe where people dump their trash in streams behind the hamlet.
  - Piskvorrr 2y ago
    Such as...in the Danube river O_O https://phys.org/news/2020-09-brown-danube-belgrade-sewers-taint.html https://phys.org/news/2020-09-brown-danube-belgrade-sewers-t...
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    Semi related - the UK pouring sewage into its waterways has been front page news of late. It’s up to 3.6 million hours of sewage discharge per year. https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-62631320 https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-62631320
    - patmorgan23 2y ago
      Franch put a lot of effort into rerouting old swears that dumped into the seine ahead of the up coming Olympics so they could hold events in the river
    - daedalus_f 2y ago
      When you say the UK, what you mean is a group of corrupt private companies that find it more convenient and cost friendly to dump raw sewage rather than correctly process it. I'm fairly sure the majority of people in the UK would be in favour of nationalising such companies and instead dumping their executives into the river instead [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V-Nwk9E1bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V-Nwk9E1bs
Animats 2y ago
The "modernized version", available as a font file, was modernized too much.[1] It doesn't look period. The H.P. Lovecraft Society has some 19th century fonts, if you need them.[2] Those were recovered from old documents. [1] https://typespec.co.uk/doves-type/ https://typespec.co.uk/doves-type/ [2] https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php
- zettabomb 2y ago
  I'm curious what you mean by not looking "period". The HPLHS fonts frankly seem to just be poor quality, rather than old. If you look at the images of the original type, Doves appears to be quite faithful to the original. Perhaps it's worth noting that we still use typefaces remarkably similar to the Romans, particularly Times New Roman, which despite its many shortcomings retains a "modern" look by virtue of still being in use.
  - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
    They are intended to be of historically appropriate quality, for use in creating period versimilitude: > Many of these fonts have slightly rough edges or irregular shapes, to capture the feel of old lead type and bygone printing technologies
    - zettabomb 2y ago
      Not all documents from the time period would've had such low quality though, and not everyone would want such quality in a modern document. If you want such an effect, it's always possible to add it later, but it's rather more difficult to remove it if it's baked into the font file.
  - vargr616 2y ago
    Roman type has roots in Italian printing of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, but Times New Roman's design has no connection to Rome or to the Romans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman
sriram_malhar 2y ago
This has so much of what I (as an outsider) love about the UK. The love of typography & general design chops, mudlarks, art and design in public life, the spirit of enquiry and adventure and, the presence of people in the bureaucracy and elsewhere who recognize whimsy and put institutional resources behind that pursuit.
unraveller 2y ago
Doves is insanely easy on the eyes despite so much going on. There is also mebinac[1] an unauthorized contemporary take on the original doves. Mebinac doesn't leap off the page as well yet deals with modern punctuation in a more normal way. Personally you can freely use them to great affect in your RSS reader or mail app that you read everyday. [1] https://fontsme.com/mebinac.font https://fontsme.com/mebinac.font
- stevefolta 2y ago
  I tried looking at code in Mebinac, and was surprised at how strongly it reminded me of old screenshots of Smalltalk.
- dkga 2y ago
  This font is beautiful, thanks for sharing.
- AnthonBerg 2y ago
  Thanks!, hadn’t come across Mebinac. It’s quite good! I’m also a big fan of Igino Marini’s recreation of the Fell typefaces: The Fell Types took their name from John Fell, a Bishop of Oxford in the seventeenth-century. Not only he created an unique collection of printing types but he started one of the most important adventures in the history of typography. — https://web.archive.org/web/20240128075552/https://iginomarini.com/fell/the-revival-fonts/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240128075552/https://iginomari... The IM Fell fonts themselves seem to live on Google Fonts these days: https://fonts.google.com/?query=Igino+Marini https://fonts.google.com/?query=Igino+Marini I use Doves Type for… everything. One day I started to find my monomaniacal obsession a bit funny and sort of to spite myself I set every font in Firefox to Doves Type. Serif, sans-serif, monospace, no other fonts allowed, as well as the UI font by tweaking the Firefox user profile iirc. And it was just… very good. And I kept using it. I use Doves Type for everything, and to be able to do that on my phone I use iFont: https://apps.apple.com/is/app/ifont-find-install-any-font/id1173222289 https://apps.apple.com/is/app/ifont-find-install-any-font/id... Or yeah I do use IBM PC VGA 9x16, IBM BIOS 8x8, and Eagle Spirit PC CGA Board Alternate 3 a little :) From the Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ I even munged together a combination of Doves Type Regular and IM Fell Great Primer Italic that matches the character scale and linespacing to both each other and to the IBM PC VGA 9x16 font at 1:1 size. The open-source FontForge did the trick!: https://fontforge.org/en-US/ https://fontforge.org/en-US/ (FontForge can autogenerate italics for any font. If you’re bored, I suggest loading up the classic VGA font and pressing the ITALICIZE button on ot. It’s… interesting!) In general, on Windows I much prefer MacType’s fomt rendering: https://www.mactype.net https://www.mactype.net … it’s kind of amazing that this kind of surgery is even possible.
dang 2y ago
Related. Others? I think there were others. The lost Doves Press typeface and its revival (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791125 - Aug 2019 (9 comments) How the Doves Type Was Nearly Lost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476579 - Sept 2016 (44 comments) One man's obsession with rediscovering the Doves typeface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951869 - July 2015 (32 comments) Lost typeface printing blocks found in river Thames - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307 - Feb 2015 (22 comments) The fight over the Doves: A legendary typeface gets a second life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964013 - Dec 2013 (12 comments)
- proactivesvcs 2y ago
  There were many more, but these were all dang could find after pg threw them in the river.
  - jprd 2y ago
    I spittaked coffee all over my monitor just now. I know this sounds like a Reddit comment, but I couldn't help but big-up your joke. Well played.
  - ForOldHack 2y ago
    Now that was funny. Really.
raldi 2y ago
I’m left wanting to hear more about the motivation for dumping the type in the first place. What kind of swindle was suspected? Did the partner try to reconstruct the type?
- surfingdino 2y ago
  https://youtu.be/e8harWbZN6U?si=4D5ZDCn2WLlciy5T&t=1002 https://youtu.be/e8harWbZN6U?si=4D5ZDCn2WLlciy5T&t=1002
riwsky 2y ago
Thames New Roman
- paledot 2y ago
  I came looking for this and was not disappointed. (Though I also appreciate that the top comment is more thoughtful, a credit to HN's priorities.)
- surfingdino 2y ago
  You win the Internet today :-)
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Whoever downvoted this has no soul.
    - Jerrrry 2y ago
      >pun >you win the internet >downvote It is against the rules to tell you which rule you are breaking. hint hint.
    - fuzzfactor 2y ago
      Don't disrespect the downvote-a-bot ! What's you expecting a soul for?
morrbo 2y ago
We actually have this. Obviously not this particular font. My family were all printers and I've sort of inherited a huge cabinet full of old school typefaces all carved out of some special kind of hard wood - pear wood - all over 100 years old. Absolutely 0 idea what we can do with it, but it's all hand made and very cool. Felt pertinet to share lol
- therellbetypos 2y ago
  Interesting! While I'm no Kris Sowersby or Robert Green, I have a side-side project to carve my own wood type (I've got a stack of Beech rounds drying in the shed) when I finally get a chance. It'd be cool to see some photos of your collection. If you're in the States, places like Hamilton Type and Hatch Show Print have tonnes of old an quirky display faces that they still use regularly.
- 317070 2y ago
  Maybe drop Robert Green (the man behind this article) an email on: https://typespec.co.uk/custom-font-services/ https://typespec.co.uk/custom-font-services/
  - bradrn 2y ago
    Klim Type Foundry [1] may also be worth a contact — they’ve been inspired by woodcut type before (e.g. [2] [3]), so I wonder if they might be interested in knowing about this. [1] https://klim.co.nz/ https://klim.co.nz/ [2] https://klim.co.nz/blog/maelstrom-design-information/ https://klim.co.nz/blog/maelstrom-design-information/ [3] https://klim.co.nz/blog/manuka-design-information/ https://klim.co.nz/blog/manuka-design-information/
JNRowe 2y ago
We've had centuries of embankment works along the Thames¹, a fair bit concentrated around the areas you'd expect to find type like this². There must be a phenomenal amount of history that was purposely covered around there. Given the scale of the works you'd have to imagine there is a significant chunk of non-London history to be found there too(the scale of granite imports from Cornwall being an obvious example). I'm less optimistic about the possibility of more large scale digs though, as the Golden Jubilee bridge history³ points out the area is an also an exciting zone for stumbling in to unexploded ordnance and you always seem to be within few metres of a tube line or Victorian sewer. [It is the reason I love those plucky Crossrail⁴ developers who've felt the anger from the havoc they've left across London over the few past decades. We get incredible large scale engineering works to lust over, coupled with really wacky archaeological digs tagging along for the ride.] ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embanking_of_the_tidal_Thames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embanking_of_the_tidal_Thames ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Embankment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Embankment - Both the "home" of the type in Hammersmith and Fleet were the targets of embankment work in the 19th century ³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_Bridge_and_Golden_Jubilee_Bridges#The_new_footbridges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_Bridge_and_Golden_J... ⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail
- lostlogin 2y ago
  On a trip to London and having heard of mudlarking, I walked in one of the ‘beaches’. I immediately found an old belt belt buckle and about 20 stems from old clay pipes. My father found a 17th century cork screw. There must be an absolute wealth of finds along its banks.
baerrie 2y ago
Nicola White documents here interesting mudlarking adventures on youtube, I recommend it! https://youtu.be/rVxncipNvvY?si=1DGluOHT8T5fRNfE https://youtu.be/rVxncipNvvY?si=1DGluOHT8T5fRNfE
komali2 2y ago
I'm wryly curious why fonts are among the odd things that really get the goat of us turbo-nerds on forums like HN.
- mihaic 2y ago
  When you spend most of your day staring at text on a screen, the minutia of how that text looks like become very important.
  - AnthonBerg 2y ago
    The centuries-old artistry of mass reproduction of thought has many wonderful minutiae!, as high technology often does.
- Biganon 2y ago
  It has just the right balance of technology, art, history, and trivia fun facts. Makes it one of the best topics for us nerds. Also, programmers spend a huge fraction of their time reading. Reading code, reading docs, reading reading reading. Fonts are important for us from an ergonomic point of view (and it's also a matter of taste and aesthetics!)
  - mrbluecoat 2y ago
    Agreed, same reason the Monaspace font 1.1 release made news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267120
  - deleted 2y ago
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mihaic 2y ago
PSA for the inspiration for this font, the great Nicolas Jenson, who around 1470 had pretty much perfected the latin typeface. Later, more famous types, such as Caslon or Garamond, are just variations on this.
- dhosek 2y ago
  Not really. Jenson’s typeface (modern revivals include Montype’s Centaur and Adobe Jenson) retained a lot of calligraphic features which figure less in later faces. Garamond is much more of a type design than lettering in type and Caslon is wholly typographic in its nature.
  - mihaic 2y ago
    You are technically correct. Even though that's the best kind of correct, I'd see these later developments as mostly natural refinements of the medium, that didn't really alter the fundamentals. From Jenson until the first Grotesk fonts I don't think there was anything large one-time leap, but rather a sequence of gradual evolutions.
rawling 2y ago
Curious as to why this refers to recovering the type being important to creating a digital version of the typeface, when lower in the article it shows that there is a surviving bible. Couldn't that have already been used to reproduce the font?
- wrp 2y ago
  Due to irregular spreading of the ink when printing, the shapes on the page are not perfect representations of the type shape, so the true shape of the metal form has to be inferred from comparing multiple printed samples. There are digital reproductions of old typefaces that try to reproduce the actual weight on the page, but they seem to be not very popular with modern designers unless they are going for a deliberately archaic look.
  - gus_massa 2y ago
    I'd expect the original designers to know and consider that effect, and make the types slightly thiner, so the printed version looks as intended.
    - wrp 2y ago
      They did and that is a huge point of contention in the revival of classic typefaces. In the 1970s, there was a massive push to digitize existing founts, but the type companies did it by tracing the metal rather than the prints. The result was digital fonts that printed much lighter than the original metal type. Most digitizations of early 20th-century typefaces you can find have this problem. By the late 1970s, people began to pay more heed to the actual printed shapes. I like early 20th-century typographic style and am always on the lookout for good type reproductions, but there are two other factors that come into play. One is that a font designed to look a certain way when press-printed won't look quite the same coming out of your laser printer. The other is that modern taste is for thinner lines. When I use a revival of a classic type, I want it to look at it did back when, but apparently I'm in the minority.
      - 2y ago
wrp 2y ago
There was also a revival of the Doves type made by Torbjörn Olsson in 1994. It is no longer available, but you can find the old specimen PDF at the Internet Archive and extract the embedded fonts. The weight is a bit lighter than the Robert Green version, but also has an italic face. https://web.archive.org/web/20121127135748/home1.swipnet.se/~w-10011/Tobbe/large/doves.html https://web.archive.org/web/20121127135748/home1.swipnet.se/...
deleted 2y ago
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KaiserPro 2y ago
You might also like "Zilvertype" which is from the dutch font school of roughly the same time. https://www.alphabettes.org/zilvertype/ https://www.alphabettes.org/zilvertype/
TehCorwiz 2y ago
Again? I swear this happened about a decade ago. Yeah, here it is: https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/15/lost-typeface-rediscovered-almost-100-years-after-being-thrown-in-the-river-thames-5104735/ https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/15/lost-typeface-rediscovered-al... EDIT: It's the same typeface.
pimlottc 2y ago
There’s a great episode of the Futility Closet podcast about the Doves Type and the dispute that lead to it being dumped into the Thames: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/04/podcast-episode-168-destruction-doves-type/ https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/04/podcast-episode-16...
aidenn0 2y ago
Thames Old Roman?
ada1981 2y ago
Wild they didn’t include an example of the actual typeface in the article. Also, I’m curious how there were 500,000 pieces in the typeface.
HumanProtractor 2y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240507064635/https://news.artnet.com/art-world/doves-typeface-2454807 https://web.archive.org/web/20240507064635/https://news.artn... Archive link, this site won't load at all for me.

That's cool. I admit hearing that story and thinking, "Is that how it happened? could a diver find it?" Apparently, they could! Great work on someone seeing it through.

starkparker 2y ago

I remember the earlier story about the disposal and Robert Green's obsession with reviving it back in 2013 in The Economist[1]—at that time, "Intrepid fans have occasionally tried to recover pieces of the type from the river, but no one has ever found any"—so it's good to hear that the story didn't end there. [1]: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2013/12/19/the-fight-over-the-doves https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2013/12/19/the-... (paywalled; https://archive.is/XfK1x https://archive.is/XfK1x)

kens 2y ago

The recovery of the Doves typeface from the Thames was discussed on HN in 2015, so this story goes way back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307

beardyw 2y ago
Yes, very old news.
- 33282334 2y ago
  hek free
dang 2y ago
Added to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40271786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40271786. Thanks!

neilv 2y ago

> “It is not that unusual to find pieces of type in the river,” Sandy said. “Particularly around Fleet Street, where newspaper typesetters would throw pieces in the water when they couldn’t be bothered to put them back in their cases. Some assistant being lazy, or rushing to "finish" a task? Or sorts that broke, or were worn out, and it was normal to toss things into the river? Or a ritual? (Say, toss a sort into the river for the first page an apprentice sets, or when there's a press failure, or for superstition after printing very bad news?)

timeon 2y ago
> it was normal to toss things into the river? It was normal. Rivers were used for dumping the garbage. In some places they still are. I know about instances in Europe where people dump their trash in streams behind the hamlet.
- Piskvorrr 2y ago
  Such as...in the Danube river O_O https://phys.org/news/2020-09-brown-danube-belgrade-sewers-taint.html https://phys.org/news/2020-09-brown-danube-belgrade-sewers-t...
- lostlogin 2y ago
  Semi related - the UK pouring sewage into its waterways has been front page news of late. It’s up to 3.6 million hours of sewage discharge per year. https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-62631320 https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-62631320
  - patmorgan23 2y ago
    Franch put a lot of effort into rerouting old swears that dumped into the seine ahead of the up coming Olympics so they could hold events in the river
  - daedalus_f 2y ago
    When you say the UK, what you mean is a group of corrupt private companies that find it more convenient and cost friendly to dump raw sewage rather than correctly process it. I'm fairly sure the majority of people in the UK would be in favour of nationalising such companies and instead dumping their executives into the river instead [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V-Nwk9E1bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V-Nwk9E1bs

Animats 2y ago

The "modernized version", available as a font file, was modernized too much.[1] It doesn't look period. The H.P. Lovecraft Society has some 19th century fonts, if you need them.[2] Those were recovered from old documents. [1] https://typespec.co.uk/doves-type/ https://typespec.co.uk/doves-type/ [2] https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php

zettabomb 2y ago
I'm curious what you mean by not looking "period". The HPLHS fonts frankly seem to just be poor quality, rather than old. If you look at the images of the original type, Doves appears to be quite faithful to the original. Perhaps it's worth noting that we still use typefaces remarkably similar to the Romans, particularly Times New Roman, which despite its many shortcomings retains a "modern" look by virtue of still being in use.
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  They are intended to be of historically appropriate quality, for use in creating period versimilitude: > Many of these fonts have slightly rough edges or irregular shapes, to capture the feel of old lead type and bygone printing technologies
  - zettabomb 2y ago
    Not all documents from the time period would've had such low quality though, and not everyone would want such quality in a modern document. If you want such an effect, it's always possible to add it later, but it's rather more difficult to remove it if it's baked into the font file.
- vargr616 2y ago
  Roman type has roots in Italian printing of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, but Times New Roman's design has no connection to Rome or to the Romans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman

sriram_malhar 2y ago

This has so much of what I (as an outsider) love about the UK. The love of typography & general design chops, mudlarks, art and design in public life, the spirit of enquiry and adventure and, the presence of people in the bureaucracy and elsewhere who recognize whimsy and put institutional resources behind that pursuit.

unraveller 2y ago

Doves is insanely easy on the eyes despite so much going on. There is also mebinac[1] an unauthorized contemporary take on the original doves. Mebinac doesn't leap off the page as well yet deals with modern punctuation in a more normal way. Personally you can freely use them to great affect in your RSS reader or mail app that you read everyday. [1] https://fontsme.com/mebinac.font https://fontsme.com/mebinac.font

stevefolta 2y ago
I tried looking at code in Mebinac, and was surprised at how strongly it reminded me of old screenshots of Smalltalk.
dkga 2y ago
This font is beautiful, thanks for sharing.
AnthonBerg 2y ago
Thanks!, hadn’t come across Mebinac. It’s quite good! I’m also a big fan of Igino Marini’s recreation of the Fell typefaces: The Fell Types took their name from John Fell, a Bishop of Oxford in the seventeenth-century. Not only he created an unique collection of printing types but he started one of the most important adventures in the history of typography. — https://web.archive.org/web/20240128075552/https://iginomarini.com/fell/the-revival-fonts/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240128075552/https://iginomari... The IM Fell fonts themselves seem to live on Google Fonts these days: https://fonts.google.com/?query=Igino+Marini https://fonts.google.com/?query=Igino+Marini I use Doves Type for… everything. One day I started to find my monomaniacal obsession a bit funny and sort of to spite myself I set every font in Firefox to Doves Type. Serif, sans-serif, monospace, no other fonts allowed, as well as the UI font by tweaking the Firefox user profile iirc. And it was just… very good. And I kept using it. I use Doves Type for everything, and to be able to do that on my phone I use iFont: https://apps.apple.com/is/app/ifont-find-install-any-font/id1173222289 https://apps.apple.com/is/app/ifont-find-install-any-font/id... Or yeah I do use IBM PC VGA 9x16, IBM BIOS 8x8, and Eagle Spirit PC CGA Board Alternate 3 a little :) From the Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ I even munged together a combination of Doves Type Regular and IM Fell Great Primer Italic that matches the character scale and linespacing to both each other and to the IBM PC VGA 9x16 font at 1:1 size. The open-source FontForge did the trick!: https://fontforge.org/en-US/ https://fontforge.org/en-US/ (FontForge can autogenerate italics for any font. If you’re bored, I suggest loading up the classic VGA font and pressing the ITALICIZE button on ot. It’s… interesting!) In general, on Windows I much prefer MacType’s fomt rendering: https://www.mactype.net https://www.mactype.net … it’s kind of amazing that this kind of surgery is even possible.

dang 2y ago

Related. Others? I think there were others. The lost Doves Press typeface and its revival (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791125 - Aug 2019 (9 comments) How the Doves Type Was Nearly Lost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476579 - Sept 2016 (44 comments) One man's obsession with rediscovering the Doves typeface - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951869 - July 2015 (32 comments) Lost typeface printing blocks found in river Thames - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307 - Feb 2015 (22 comments) The fight over the Doves: A legendary typeface gets a second life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964013 - Dec 2013 (12 comments)

proactivesvcs 2y ago
There were many more, but these were all dang could find after pg threw them in the river.
- jprd 2y ago
  I spittaked coffee all over my monitor just now. I know this sounds like a Reddit comment, but I couldn't help but big-up your joke. Well played.
- ForOldHack 2y ago
  Now that was funny. Really.

raldi 2y ago

I’m left wanting to hear more about the motivation for dumping the type in the first place. What kind of swindle was suspected? Did the partner try to reconstruct the type?

surfingdino 2y ago
https://youtu.be/e8harWbZN6U?si=4D5ZDCn2WLlciy5T&t=1002 https://youtu.be/e8harWbZN6U?si=4D5ZDCn2WLlciy5T&t=1002

riwsky 2y ago

Thames New Roman

paledot 2y ago
I came looking for this and was not disappointed. (Though I also appreciate that the top comment is more thoughtful, a credit to HN's priorities.)
surfingdino 2y ago
You win the Internet today :-)
- rayiner 2y ago
  Whoever downvoted this has no soul.
  - Jerrrry 2y ago
    >pun >you win the internet >downvote It is against the rules to tell you which rule you are breaking. hint hint.
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    Don't disrespect the downvote-a-bot ! What's you expecting a soul for?

morrbo 2y ago

We actually have this. Obviously not this particular font. My family were all printers and I've sort of inherited a huge cabinet full of old school typefaces all carved out of some special kind of hard wood - pear wood - all over 100 years old. Absolutely 0 idea what we can do with it, but it's all hand made and very cool. Felt pertinet to share lol

therellbetypos 2y ago
Interesting! While I'm no Kris Sowersby or Robert Green, I have a side-side project to carve my own wood type (I've got a stack of Beech rounds drying in the shed) when I finally get a chance. It'd be cool to see some photos of your collection. If you're in the States, places like Hamilton Type and Hatch Show Print have tonnes of old an quirky display faces that they still use regularly.
317070 2y ago
Maybe drop Robert Green (the man behind this article) an email on: https://typespec.co.uk/custom-font-services/ https://typespec.co.uk/custom-font-services/
- bradrn 2y ago
  Klim Type Foundry [1] may also be worth a contact — they’ve been inspired by woodcut type before (e.g. [2] [3]), so I wonder if they might be interested in knowing about this. [1] https://klim.co.nz/ https://klim.co.nz/ [2] https://klim.co.nz/blog/maelstrom-design-information/ https://klim.co.nz/blog/maelstrom-design-information/ [3] https://klim.co.nz/blog/manuka-design-information/ https://klim.co.nz/blog/manuka-design-information/

JNRowe 2y ago

We've had centuries of embankment works along the Thames¹, a fair bit concentrated around the areas you'd expect to find type like this². There must be a phenomenal amount of history that was purposely covered around there. Given the scale of the works you'd have to imagine there is a significant chunk of non-London history to be found there too(the scale of granite imports from Cornwall being an obvious example). I'm less optimistic about the possibility of more large scale digs though, as the Golden Jubilee bridge history³ points out the area is an also an exciting zone for stumbling in to unexploded ordnance and you always seem to be within few metres of a tube line or Victorian sewer. [It is the reason I love those plucky Crossrail⁴ developers who've felt the anger from the havoc they've left across London over the few past decades. We get incredible large scale engineering works to lust over, coupled with really wacky archaeological digs tagging along for the ride.] ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embanking_of_the_tidal_Thames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embanking_of_the_tidal_Thames ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Embankment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Embankment - Both the "home" of the type in Hammersmith and Fleet were the targets of embankment work in the 19th century ³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_Bridge_and_Golden_Jubilee_Bridges#The_new_footbridges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_Bridge_and_Golden_J... ⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail

lostlogin 2y ago
On a trip to London and having heard of mudlarking, I walked in one of the ‘beaches’. I immediately found an old belt belt buckle and about 20 stems from old clay pipes. My father found a 17th century cork screw. There must be an absolute wealth of finds along its banks.

baerrie 2y ago

Nicola White documents here interesting mudlarking adventures on youtube, I recommend it! https://youtu.be/rVxncipNvvY?si=1DGluOHT8T5fRNfE https://youtu.be/rVxncipNvvY?si=1DGluOHT8T5fRNfE

komali2 2y ago

I'm wryly curious why fonts are among the odd things that really get the goat of us turbo-nerds on forums like HN.

mihaic 2y ago
When you spend most of your day staring at text on a screen, the minutia of how that text looks like become very important.
- AnthonBerg 2y ago
  The centuries-old artistry of mass reproduction of thought has many wonderful minutiae!, as high technology often does.
Biganon 2y ago
It has just the right balance of technology, art, history, and trivia fun facts. Makes it one of the best topics for us nerds. Also, programmers spend a huge fraction of their time reading. Reading code, reading docs, reading reading reading. Fonts are important for us from an ergonomic point of view (and it's also a matter of taste and aesthetics!)
- mrbluecoat 2y ago
  Agreed, same reason the Monaspace font 1.1 release made news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267120 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267120
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mihaic 2y ago

PSA for the inspiration for this font, the great Nicolas Jenson, who around 1470 had pretty much perfected the latin typeface. Later, more famous types, such as Caslon or Garamond, are just variations on this.

dhosek 2y ago
Not really. Jenson’s typeface (modern revivals include Montype’s Centaur and Adobe Jenson) retained a lot of calligraphic features which figure less in later faces. Garamond is much more of a type design than lettering in type and Caslon is wholly typographic in its nature.
- mihaic 2y ago
  You are technically correct. Even though that's the best kind of correct, I'd see these later developments as mostly natural refinements of the medium, that didn't really alter the fundamentals. From Jenson until the first Grotesk fonts I don't think there was anything large one-time leap, but rather a sequence of gradual evolutions.

rawling 2y ago

Curious as to why this refers to recovering the type being important to creating a digital version of the typeface, when lower in the article it shows that there is a surviving bible. Couldn't that have already been used to reproduce the font?

wrp 2y ago
Due to irregular spreading of the ink when printing, the shapes on the page are not perfect representations of the type shape, so the true shape of the metal form has to be inferred from comparing multiple printed samples. There are digital reproductions of old typefaces that try to reproduce the actual weight on the page, but they seem to be not very popular with modern designers unless they are going for a deliberately archaic look.
- gus_massa 2y ago
  I'd expect the original designers to know and consider that effect, and make the types slightly thiner, so the printed version looks as intended.
  - wrp 2y ago
    They did and that is a huge point of contention in the revival of classic typefaces. In the 1970s, there was a massive push to digitize existing founts, but the type companies did it by tracing the metal rather than the prints. The result was digital fonts that printed much lighter than the original metal type. Most digitizations of early 20th-century typefaces you can find have this problem. By the late 1970s, people began to pay more heed to the actual printed shapes. I like early 20th-century typographic style and am always on the lookout for good type reproductions, but there are two other factors that come into play. One is that a font designed to look a certain way when press-printed won't look quite the same coming out of your laser printer. The other is that modern taste is for thinner lines. When I use a revival of a classic type, I want it to look at it did back when, but apparently I'm in the minority.
    - 2y ago

wrp 2y ago

There was also a revival of the Doves type made by Torbjörn Olsson in 1994. It is no longer available, but you can find the old specimen PDF at the Internet Archive and extract the embedded fonts. The weight is a bit lighter than the Robert Green version, but also has an italic face. https://web.archive.org/web/20121127135748/home1.swipnet.se/~w-10011/Tobbe/large/doves.html https://web.archive.org/web/20121127135748/home1.swipnet.se/...

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KaiserPro 2y ago

You might also like "Zilvertype" which is from the dutch font school of roughly the same time. https://www.alphabettes.org/zilvertype/ https://www.alphabettes.org/zilvertype/

TehCorwiz 2y ago

Again? I swear this happened about a decade ago. Yeah, here it is: https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/15/lost-typeface-rediscovered-almost-100-years-after-being-thrown-in-the-river-thames-5104735/ https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/15/lost-typeface-rediscovered-al... EDIT: It's the same typeface.

pimlottc 2y ago

There’s a great episode of the Futility Closet podcast about the Doves Type and the dispute that lead to it being dumped into the Thames: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/04/podcast-episode-168-destruction-doves-type/ https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/04/podcast-episode-16...

aidenn0 2y ago

Thames Old Roman?

ada1981 2y ago

Wild they didn’t include an example of the actual typeface in the article. Also, I’m curious how there were 500,000 pieces in the typeface.

HumanProtractor 2y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240507064635/https://news.artnet.com/art-world/doves-typeface-2454807 https://web.archive.org/web/20240507064635/https://news.artn... Archive link, this site won't load at all for me.