Making a Book. Part 1 - The Write Type
“The Ideal Book is a composite thing made up of many parts & may be made beautiful by the beauty of each of its parts — its literary content, its material or materials, its writing or printing, its illumination or illustration, its binding and decoration…” TJ Cobden-Sanderson, ”The Ideal Book or The Book Beautiful” (Doves Press, 1901)
How to make a book? Last time I wrote about how I struggled to think that I could actually write or do justice to the tales I wanted to spin. How an intervention by a friend led me directly to TS Eliot and rather than intimidating me, it spurred me on. Quite a thing to have such a muse or ‘Awen’ as they say in Cymraeg.
As I found out more about this special Awen, he led me to some amazing stories and some quite moving and beautiful things. So in creating the beginnings of my stories and rhymes, some very special elements have found their way, woven into this organic adventure.
To begin with, I was obsessed by Polly Tandy, her husband, Geoffrey, and their three children. Close friends of Eliot’s, they lived in this house and Alison (probably aged somewhere between 6 and 8) had left her pencil markings in my airing cupboard; probably only found because I am as tiny as a child and can fit inside the cupboard, as she had done in the 1930s.
When we first moved into Hope Cottage, we were almost immediately visited by small birds. At the time, I thought perhaps it was hugely unlucky for little birds to come and fly inside the house. There were three of them, coming in one-by-one over the first few weeks we were here. I’m almost certain they were wrens or maybe one of them was a sparrow. I remember two of them being tiny and one of them being a bit bigger. I worried about this strange happening for years afterwards but now I feel like they were almost like the three Tandy children, welcoming us into their house.
I tried to find out all I could about Geoffrey and how he’d come to know TS Eliot in the late 1920s. Following that line, I found that Geoffrey and Polly had first lived near the Thames in Chiswick and seemed to be part of a circle that met near Hammersmith Bridge, in the pub, The Dove. Then I found the publishing link to the Cobden-Sandersons and The Doves Press. Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson was the father of Richard, a good friend and collaborator with TS Eliot who had first published Eliot’s “The Criterion” (the first edition containing “The Waste Land”) in 1922. It’s difficult to portray the levels of excitement I felt as all these threads drew me in. To find that Thomas Cobden-Sanderson had been involved in the Arts & Crafts movement with William Morris, when I have a love of that aesthetic and philosophy, felt right. To discover he’d named The Doves Bindery after the pub, The Dove and to imagine all the creativity and conversations that must have centred on this place by the side of the magnificent Thames… But as with anything beautiful and well-conceived, the threads didn’t end there. In wondering whether I could licence the font for my books, my research led me to Robert Green and his project and obsession to revive the beautiful Doves Type which had been lost to the world.
When we began Camp Dodo, my heart was leading me to the idea of precious things that had been lost but that could, perhaps, be revived. I’d named my company ‘Studio Hiraeth’ after the beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking feeling that many Welsh people have, longing for past days and their homeland. I had worked in children’s media and broadcasting and in this digital age, I was longing for children to have the opportunities that we had had in simpler times. My creatures are often ‘extinct’ ones and lost to today’s world but I wanted to bring them back to the modern world. So how tantalising to find out about an amazing man, completely obsessed with the Doves Type… an extinct type but he was finding a way to bring it back.
"Portrait of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson," 1902. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Perhaps you know of the story? - it’s an epic one. The tale of how Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson was unwilling to retire and leave what he saw as his type to his business partner, Emery Walker. Starting in 1899, they had created a beautiful typeface based on Venetian 15th century types. It is known for its simple elegance. The two men had very different temperaments by all accounts. Cobden-Sanderson perhaps the visionary, fanatical partner whilst Walker appears to have been a quieter, gentle businessman. Cobden-Sanderson felt that Walker wasn’t as committed and came to resent the idea of Walker legally inheriting his life’s work on his death. Taking matters into his own hands, the now elderly, Cobden-Sanderson embarked on a secret mission beginning on Good Friday 1913 when he disposed of the punches and matrices of the Doves Type. His mission would end in early 1917 after he had made around 170 nightly trips to Hammersmith Bridge to dispose of the metal sorts. He had selected his position carefully and under cover of darkness, he repeatedly committed the metal type into the swirling depths of the Thames. There they lay, lost for almost a century, until designer Robert Green began his retrieval mission in 2014. Several videos of Robert’s work can be found online and tell of this legendary story and of Green’s obsession in finding the type and in painstakingly recreating it digitally. His determination and obvious love for the type shine through as he explains how he pieced all his research together, using Cobden-Sanderson’s diaries and clues to guess the likely disposal position. Obtaining a mudlarking licence he managed to find three pieces of the type on his first attempt. As soon as I saw a picture of the first three pieces found: a ‘v’, an ‘i’ and an ‘e’, I couldn’t helping thinking ‘how apt’; ‘vie’ meaning ‘life’ in French. Robert Green found something precious and lost, and brought it back to life. Later he would enlist the London Port Authority divers to look for more. With around 150 metal sorts found, Green has managed to recreate the type digitally and how beautiful it is.
As Cobden-Sanderson acknowledged, the type or calligraphy is only one aspect of the ideal book. The printing and binding are other aspects and I had stumbled across possibly the best book printers in the UK. Best of all, they were in Wales…