A Printmaker’s Secret

The history of the Doves Type reflects a printmaker’s timeless passion for his work, work which survives today into the 21st century. This story was the inspiration for my portfolio image.

For 100 years Hammersmith Bridge in West London held a dark secret. Hidden below her spires lay over a ton of lead type, tossed into the mud by Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson after a bitter feud with his business partner. Cobden-Sanderson was an English artist, engraver, and bookbinder associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement who established the local Doves Press in Hammersmith, London in the late 1800’s. Locked in sand, after surviving bombs, war and years of neglect, the type was retrieved by divers in 2014 at the behest of Robert Green, a London designer and printmaker. Green painstakingly developed and published a modern electronic version of the type in 2016. Modeled after a fifteenth-century Venetian design, the Doves Type was used in the original publication of rare manuscripts. It exerted a major influence on book design in Europe and the United States and is said to be one of the most exquisite ever published.

SUSAN PATTERSON