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.<p>Personally you can freely use them to great affect in your RSS reader or mail app that you read everyday.<p>[1] <a href="https://fontsme.com/mebinac.font" rel="nofollow">https://fontsme.com/mebinac.font</a>
Related. Others? I think there were others.<p><i>The lost Doves Press typeface and its revival (2015)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791125">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791125</a> - Aug 2019 (9 comments)<p><i>How the Doves Type Was Nearly Lost</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476579">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476579</a> - Sept 2016 (44 comments)<p><i>One man's obsession with rediscovering the Doves typeface</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951869">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951869</a> - July 2015 (32 comments)<p><i>Lost typeface printing blocks found in river Thames</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307</a> - Feb 2015 (22 comments)<p><i>The fight over the Doves: A legendary typeface gets a second life</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964013">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964013</a> - Dec 2013 (12 comments)
The "modernized version", available as a font file, was modernized too much.[1]
It doesn't look period.<p>The H.P. Lovecraft Society has some 19th century fonts, if you need them.[2] Those were recovered from old documents.<p>[1] <a href="https://typespec.co.uk/doves-type/" rel="nofollow">https://typespec.co.uk/doves-type/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php</a>
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.
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.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20121127135748/home1.swipnet.se/~w-10011/Tobbe/large/doves.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20121127135748/home1.swipnet.se/...</a>
> <i>“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.</i><p>Some assistant being lazy, or rushing to "finish" a task?<p>Or sorts that broke, or were worn out, and it was normal to toss things into the river?<p>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?)
The recovery of the Doves typeface from the Thames was discussed on HN in 2015, so this story goes way back.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307</a>
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).<p>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.<p>[It is the reason I <i>love</i> 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.]<p>¹ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embanking_of_the_tidal_Thames" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embanking_of_the_tidal_Thames</a><p>² <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Embankment" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Embankment</a> - Both the "home" of the type in Hammersmith and Fleet were the targets of embankment work in the 19th century<p>³ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_Bridge_and_Golden_Jubilee_Bridges#The_new_footbridges" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_Bridge_and_Golden_J...</a><p>⁴ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail</a>
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?
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
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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2013/12/19/the-fight-over-the-doves" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2013/12/19/the-...</a> (paywalled; <a href="https://archive.is/XfK1x" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/XfK1x</a>)
PSA for the inspiration for this font, the great Nicolas Jenson, who around 1470 had pretty much perfected the latin typeface.<p>Later, more famous types, such as Caslon or Garamond, are just variations on this.
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240507064635/https://news.artnet.com/art-world/doves-typeface-2454807" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20240507064635/https://news.artn...</a><p>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.
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?
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:<p><a href="https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/04/podcast-episode-168-destruction-doves-type/" rel="nofollow">https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/04/podcast-episode-16...</a>
You might also like "Zilvertype" which is from the dutch font school of roughly the same time. <a href="https://www.alphabettes.org/zilvertype/" rel="nofollow">https://www.alphabettes.org/zilvertype/</a>
Nicola White documents here interesting mudlarking adventures on youtube, I recommend it! <a href="https://youtu.be/rVxncipNvvY?si=1DGluOHT8T5fRNfE" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/rVxncipNvvY?si=1DGluOHT8T5fRNfE</a>
Again? I swear this happened about a decade ago. Yeah, here it is: <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/15/lost-typeface-rediscovered-almost-100-years-after-being-thrown-in-the-river-thames-5104735/" rel="nofollow">https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/15/lost-typeface-rediscovered-al...</a><p>EDIT: It's the same typeface.