"Dangerously Near to Absolute Perfection"

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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 had urged him to speak.

So, Emery did.

Thomas Cobden Sanderson and Emery Walker made an unlikely couple of friends.

Thomas Cobden Sanderson 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 ribcage with his bare hands.

And Thomas Cobden 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.

Emery 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 center 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 favoured the cheap over the beautiful.

Nobody had ever seen such images projected in a lecture, and the content was as important as the format.

Emery 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 Kelm Scott Press, and he did nothing without first asking the advice of Emery Walker.

Kelm Scott Press books were collectors' 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 Sanderson, 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 actualize 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 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 3 Hammersmith Terrace, Cobden Sanderson's at 7 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, and 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.

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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 upstairs 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.

Emery 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 Emery 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 thunderclap.

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 I,

the deeper beauty emerges from the typeface, which was called simply Doves.

Every dove's 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 Doves Bible was published in 1903,

but the effect is shockingly clear and modern.

Like the Venetian masterpieces before them, Doves 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 Walker's 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 Doves Press.

But then he trusted Thomas to handle the day-to-day printing.

Thomas Copton 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 Greene, 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 Emery 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 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 12 sons.

He never sent the letter.

Instead, he sat simmering with frustration, but determined to finish the work on the great Doves Press books they had begun together.

The small team of printers and typesetters at Doves Press worked on nothing but the Bible for three years.

The result, said one critic, was dangerously near to absolute perfection.

While Doves 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 subsidizing 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's hobby, Thomas because he was doing most of the work.

And Emery, because he could see so much potential in the Dove's style and the Dove's 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 Emery 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 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 Emery Walker using it, and Emery 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.

A few weeks later, he sued Cobden Sanderson.

Cobden 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 realize, a visionary and a fanatic.

And against a visionary and a fanatic, he will beat himself in vain.

Their mutual friends despaired at the situation.

But eventually one of them, Sidney Cockrell, managed to broker a compromise.

Thomas Cobden Sanderson was 68 years old.

Emery 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 Emery Walker?

Cockrell'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 storerooms up in Edinburgh the punches and matrices for doves.

The matrices were molds to make more copies of the dove's type.

The punches were tools to make more matrices.

As long as they existed, dove'ty type never die.

Take the punches and matrices out of storage, wrote Copton Sanderson, and send them to me.

Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.

In today's super-competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

Cautionary Tales is proudly sponsored by Amika Insurance.

They say that if you want to go fast, go alone.

But if you want to go far, go together.

When you go with Amika, you are getting coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers, so they'll help look after what's important to you together.

Auto, home, life, and more, Amika has you covered.

At Amika, they'll help protect what matters most to you.

Visit amika.com and get a quote today.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

There's more food for thought, more thought for food.

There's more data insights to help with those day-to-day choices.

There's more to the weather than whether it's going to rain.

And with our arts and entertainment coverage, you won't just get out more, you'll get more out of it.

At the Chronicle, knowing more about San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

Thomas Cobden Sanderson was capable of enraged outbursts of destruction.

One day, for example, he was binding a book and realized the leather for the binding didn't fit.

Here's what happened next, in his own

In a burst of rage, I 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 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 Dove's 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 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 Doves 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 type at Doves 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 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 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 Doves Press,

bequeath the Doves Press fount of type, the punches, matrices, And the type in use at the Doves Press at the time of my death.

Was 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.

Emery Walker eventually became Sir Emery 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 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.

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 floodwaters 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 Greene, 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 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 type has caused a 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 profits to the Emery Walker Museum.

Marion Tidcombe's book, The Dove's Press, is the definitive scholarly history of the affair.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at TimHarford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fians 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 San Juan at Brain Audio.

Ben Nadaf Hafrey edited the scripts.

The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrah, Sarah Jopp, Masaya Monroe, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Retta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kiera Posey and Owen Miller.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

It's recorded at Wardore 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.

And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

Cautionary Tales is proudly sponsored by Amika Insurance.

As Amika says, empathy is our best policy.

From listening to your insurance needs to following up after a claim, Amika provides coverage with care and compassion.

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For those with a taste for taste, grab yours today.

Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.

Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back.

So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills.

But it turns out that's very illegal.

So there goes my big idea for the commercial.

Give it a try at mintmobile.com/slash switch.

A front payment of $45 for a three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required.

New customer offers for first three months only.

Speeds low after 35 gigabytes if networks busy.

Taxes and fees extra.

See Mintmobile.com.

This is an iHeart Podcast.