In 1917, a note appeared in The Times from Cobden-Sanderson announcing the end of the Doves Press, but it was written in such florid language that no one could tell if he was being metaphorical when he said he “bequeathed” the type to the Thames.



He wasn’t. He had literally chucked it into the river.

In the final months of 1916, Cobden-Sanderson threw the punches and the matrices — the templates needed to cast type — into the water beneath Hammersmith Bridge, and followed them with every piece of Doves Type that existed.

He scattered it in tiny pieces from his pocket like tired typesetters on Blackfriars Bridge, he threw it in blocks from the foundry, and he dropped it arranged into the pages they had printed, wrapped in paper and tied with string. He did it in the night, in the dark, when no one could see him.

“I think it’s as much about quality as about any sort of underlying philosophy about industrialisation causing misery,” says Green. He’s spent a long time trying to unfurl Cobden-Sanderson’s reasoning – people have put it down to him being a Luddite, in fear of the death of the hand-pulled printing press. But that's not what motivated Cobden-Sanderson. He was worried Walker would sell it, that anyone could make a Doves Press knock-off, that it might be used for things other than great works of literature. That it might be used for advertising.

Plus, he’d had been reading Leviticus late at night, while checking for errors in their five-volume edition of the Bible. That kind of thing can get to a guy, spiritually.

“As a 70-year-old man, to walk along every night in the middle of winter with pounds and pounds of type, and risk his reputation, risk arrest, risk pneumonia or at least putting his back out — this stuff weighs a lot and he’s a tiny, frail man — there’s an element of his own sacrifice to this,” says Green. He ultimately sacrificed a ton of lead.

Five years later, Cobden-Sanderson was dead at the age of 81. He had been dead for just 12 days when Walker — who was by (most) accounts very gentle and mild-mannered but had been driven to madness by his former friend’s actions — served his grieving widow with a writ for £500, the cost of the production of the type that her husband had destroyed.

When she died four years later her ashes were placed alongside her husband’s on a wall at the bottom of their garden — on the other side was the Thames.

The following year, the river swelled and swallowed the ashes, sweeping them under Hammersmith Bridge, adding them to the type in the mud.