By David Berridge

---

Writers and artists who destroy their work can find it hard to be taken seriously. When it comes to Chaïm Soutine’s exhaustive attempts to buy back and destroy his early Céret landscape paintings, or Franz Kafka’s stated wishes about his unfinished novel manuscripts, there are few advocates for the creator’s wishes, as a century later we admire the paintings and read the books.

         Juliet Ramsden’s Imaging | A type history starts from an earlier case study of authorial destruction. From 1913 to 1917, Ramsden tells us, the book-binder, publisher and writer T. J. Cobden-Sanderson made night-time trips to Hammersmith Bridge in order to throw into the River Thames case after case of Doves Type, the typeface in which, together with his business partner Emery Walker, he had produced some of the most acclaimed books of the Arts and Crafts Movement. These included several editions of Milton and a five-volume bible, whose red and black lettering is appropriated into the design of Ramsden’s own artist’s book.

The precise reasons for Cobden-Sanderson’s actions are apt for speculation, but certainly involved an acrimonious legal dispute with Walker (who would have inherited the type upon CS’s death).

There was also (as reading the digital scan of Cobden-Sanderson’s journals at archive.org reveals) an extended period of personal, professional and philosophical reckoning in the years up to his death in 1922. That nocturnal type disposal fitted with both his rational mind’s administrative zeal and some wilder (and wider) philosophical and spiritual yearnings. 

True to the latter, Ramsden quotes an entry in Cobden-Sanderson’s journal dated Saturday 28th July 1917, 7 to 8pm. He stands on Hammersmith Bridge and remembers how in winter, hidden by darkness and passing busses, he had hurled the type off into the river. Then he looks up to behold ‘the wonder of the scene before me, full of an awful beauty, God’s universe and man’s – joint creators’ in which, freshly chucked, ‘my Type, the Doves Type was part of it’.

In parts of The Journals of Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson 1879-1922 not quoted by Ramsden the descriptions of nighttime escapades are sometimes farcical. ‘My idea was magnificent; the act ridiculous’ he records after the thrown type does not reach the river but lands on a pier of Hammersmith Bridge. CS imagines being humiliated by ‘The Thames Commissioners, the Stipendiary Magistrate, the police, the public, the newspapers!’ before walking away, deciding sagely ‘Nothing was explicable: there it was’.

Whilst aware of the romantic appeal of this backstory, Ramsden’s specific focus is the type itself (she classifies her book as a ‘typovisual story’). There are eight chapters whose titles indicate how she structures what follows:  01 The workshop / 02 To the river / 03 Fish / 04 The riverbed / 05 Letters corrode / 06 Found / 07 Digitised / 08 Thoughts.

Immediately this suggests: What is natural? What is past and present? What is an interpretive category and what an affective experience? It all gets combined: a certain historical progression from Cobden-Sanderson’s time to our own, but also a dissolving into a present made by one (typovisual) book in the hand.

Chapter 01 demonstrates the author’s minimalist concision. A caption on the verso: ‘Type in the case at CS’s / letterpress workshop’ and on the recto an image made from overlapping squares and lines of particular letters and punctuation marks. This nods to the material interests of Concrete Poetry, whilst the overlaps and slight misalignments of the grids evokes the drawers of Doves Type in Cobden-Sanderson’s busy print shop.

In Chapter 02 Ramsden describes Cobden-Sanderson walking to Hammersmith Bridge, how it took him 170 trips to complete the disposal, usually at dusk. After an illustration of a type punch and matrix (taken from Theodore De Vinne’s 1876 book, The Invention of Printing: A collection of facts and opinions), the next page is lots of white space topped with a further quote from CS’s journal admiring the river’s beauty at night.

Turn the page, there is a spread of type punches and matrixes scattered against a black background. Are they floating on or in the Thames at night? Nothing looks wet so maybe they are tumbling through the air having just been tipped from the case at the top left, off Hammersmith Bridge and into the darkness.

I describe each chapter in detail like this to give a sense of the book’s careful placing and pacing on the page. In Chapter 03, Ramsden adds a detail of her own that channels the nature-loving side of Cobden-Sanderson. Waves are composed out of brackets, white space indicates falling type, and the font’s unusual shaped question mark makes a curious fish. Turn the page and  two sample letters, I and F, are printed reversed so reading the book is akin to looking into the type tray.

Ramsden’s narrative now extends beyond Cobden-Sanderson’s own life and actions.  Pieces of type stay on the bed of the Thames, where they corrode and chip, as he anticipated:

‘May the river in its tides and flow pass them to and fro from the great sea forever [. . . ] untouched by other use.’ 

Ramsden has a whole flood of letter R’s spilling at the bottom of the page around the gutter, then a corroded R gets a page to itself, before a photograph shows the same letter ‘printed’ in the sand of the Thames foreshore. Ramsden writes how ‘work begins on reviving the Doves typeface’. This references a 2014 salvage operation, co-ordinated by type designer Robert Green, in which 151 metal pieces were retrieved from the riverbed. To try out Green’s digital reconstruction of Doves Type online, then licence it for your own use, is one way for this story to conclude.

Ramsden’s book has a different trajectory. As Chapter 07 explains: its ‘role in the digital age is uncertain, as / letterforms have new roles to fulfil.’  A digitised ligature examples the glyphs formed when letters combine to aid communication, but it also suggests mutation and breakdown into illegibility. How too, can Doves Type deal with the demands of computer code – as a screen shot of the full text version of CS’s journals online references. Maybe Cobden-Sanderson’s act of disposal was really his intuition that ‘the Doves Type was not suitable for the / modern age.’

In Chapter 08, Ramsden constructs a grid out of full stops and the forward slash. This creates some rhythmic variations but seems an image mainly illustrating the dated limitation of its own straight rows and fixed type forms. Over its top, however, is superimposed a photograph of the first edition of Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti’s book ‘Zang Tumb Tumb’ (1912-14). This is the other detail mentioned in Ramsden’s introduction: ‘a celebration of the emancipated letter’, whereby CS’s night-time emptying of type trays ‘can be seen as a direct enactment of F.T. Marinetti’s call for ‘parole in libertà’ (words set free) in his 1912 Futurist manifesto.’ 

Not that Cobden-Sanderson would have known this, for his journals suggest zero interest in burgeoning avant-garde movements across continental Europe, and a sense of disenchantment with the modern world rather than a delirious embrace of its technology and speed, through type liberation or anything else.

At first, I thought ‘words set free’ referred to an energetic, future-embracing equivalence of type hurled from the hand and words exploding out of Futurist mouth and page. But if Cobden-Sanderson’s night time shenanigans are furtive, fumbling and farcical, so the Marinetti book looks worn, closed tight, more like a dug up ancient tablet than a declaration of speed and steel.

In both examples, then, words are ‘set free’ into obsolescence as much as progression, subject to multiple natural and human processes, technologies, all the developments, accidents, and erosions that happen over time. That full-page corroded R in Chapter 05 is not something to be corrected by the type designer on their laptop in 2023, but an example of what a Doves Type authentic to its history and story would look like.

In a short Epilogue, Ramsden again quotes briefly from Cobden-Sanderson’s journals, this time his remark that giving up printing books will require him to ‘take up some other craft, mental or manual – geometry for example, and geometrical problems, or some new language [. . . ]’ His photo alongside is printed in green ink, its resolution a pattern of diagonal lines with a slight op-art vibration. The colour and lines stop the photo signifying ‘Victorian’, as a black and white image would do. Cobden-Sanderson becomes a ghost, time travelling via various reproductive technologies.

An anamorphic twist, too, in that to make the image cohere into a smoother illusionist whole, hold the book flat and peer over the edge on a level with it, so the lines disappear. All of which I describe in detail, in order to convey how every material detail of Ramsden’s publication plays a role in its typovisual narrative.

There are some details I am surprised Ramsden does not include, which I want to add into its constellation of elements. ‘I am sitting up in the nightmare of the world’ CS wrote in  his journal in 1917, partly a description of some foul weather, but also referencing the ‘daily massacre’ of World War One and a Europe ‘bent on self-destruction’.

This seems to have been a major part of his state of mind when the type disposal began, which physically the journal dates to 1917, so I wondered if Ramsden’s 1913 start date referenced a physical gesture beginning in the disputes of a life, including the acrimonious culmination of his partnership with Emery Walker, before slowly building through the next four years into its outward expression of a trip to Hammersmith Bridge.

Closing my copy of Imaging | A type history and placing it on the table, I consider the title. Pieces of Doves Type but also ‘type’ as example, a category of ‘imaging’, about which Google suggests the most common usage is medical imaging – using x-rays, ultrasound and other imaging techniques to produce 3D images of the body, that help ‘to diagnose, guide treatment and monitor’.

Applied here: a precise frame for experiment and assessment, an exemplary status for what is discovered. But exemplary of what? A detachable dust jacket features an offset-lithograph text on bright red paper, a Thames winding its way through columns and rows of letters from CS’s journal set vertically. Milky Way and sky are evoked by shining white letters, whilst the bold red foregrounds materialities of font and paper.

The letters are eroded at the bottom, as if a second Thames is washing them away, but this also indicates a graphic design for which erosion and loss is an essential part of its, well, character. Unlike Kafka and Soutine, Imaging | A type history ‘bequeaths’ (another word Cobden-Sanderson used to describe his nocturnal actions on Hammersmith Bridge) a Doves Type that over a century later is still true to its creator’s destructive urges.

---

About our contributor

---