New (to me) Resources for Doves Type

John Savard

I recently made the exciting discovery that the five-volume Bible from the Doves Press was available online at the Library of Congress.

There were some other items from the Doves Press there that weren't on the Internet Archive; the Catalog Raisonné showed a capital E with an accute accent as just having a dot on top - and in two different positions, but Ballads and Narrative Poems, or maybe its companion volume, had a short snatch of Italian in one poem, so I was finally able to obtain examples of the grave accent. (The Internet Archive did have two works from the Doves Press in German, so I had examples of the umlaut, which I could also use for a diaresis.)

This stimulated me to further research.

Fonts of the typeface Mebinac are still available, even if Torbjorn Olsson's Doves Press Type appears to have been withdrawn in the face of the sensational news of a digital revival of Doves based on type recovered from the Thames.

My first result in searching for it was the Creative Fabrica web site. At first I thought this was some kind of pirate site, but I eventually found the type designer's own page, which linked to Creative Fabrica. (The fact that using my Google account to log in to it caused a pop-up window to mention I'd be getting a confirmation code for my existing Adobe account makes me think that Adobe even has something to do with them!)

And in this process, I also paid another visit to the Wikipedia page on the typeface, and saw that it claimed that only the capital letters of Doves were based on Jenson: the lowercase was based on the work of Jacobus Rubeus. I found one book he printed on the Internet Archives; the quality of the printing was so poor, the only common factor I could see was that his Roman typeface, like Doves, had diamond tittles.

Dan Reynolds

John Savard said:

And in this process, I also paid another visit to the Wikipedia page on the typeface, and saw that it claimed that only the capital letters of Doves were based on Jenson: the lowercase was based on the work of Jacobus Rubeus. I found one book he printed on the Internet Archives; the quality of the printing was so poor, the only common factor I could see was that his Roman typeface, like Doves, had diamond tittles.

The Jacob Rubeus book that Morris and Walker consulted for their designs was printed with type cast from Jenson’s matrices. Riccardo Olocco’s publications over the past decade or so have brought a lot of light onto other printers’ uses of Jenson’s roman.

Stephen Coles

Letterform Archive’s Online Archive also has a few images from Doves Press’s The Ideal Book, 1900.

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

@John Savard Are these the links?

• The English Bible : containing the Old Testament & the New, vol. 1-5, 1903-1905. https://www.loc.gov/item/49034965/
• Catalogue raisonné of books printed & published at the Doves Press, 1900-1916, 1916. https://www.loc.gov/item/17031983/
  
• Ballads and narrative poems, 1893. https://www.loc.gov/item/49034235/

John Savard

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye said:

@John Savard Are these the links?

Oh, indeed. I was remiss in not including them, but I had thought they would be easy to find with Google.