Typefaces
Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem is an enchanting account of the author’s exploration and gentle excavation of the foreshore of the Thames, whose tidal waters regularly draw back and reveal treasures to those who know how to look. In her meditative searches, she has found Elizabethan footwear, Indian glass gems, and the plug from a Roman amphora. Items like this are fascinating in the way they lead us to consider the lives of those who lost them. Usually, of course, one can only imagine who owned a thing, and how it ended up in the Thames.
Not so for the bits of Doves type that Maiklem has found in the riverbed. This storied type was destroyed by the man who commissioned it, the founder of Doves Press, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson. Between 1913 and 1917, Cobden-Sanderson threw the matrices, punches and type over the Hammersmith Bridge in London in a dispute with his business partner Emery Walker. According to Maiklem, most, but not all of it has been recovered.
This may seem a poor topic for That’s Not Online!, since Doves type has been re-created and digitized using printed examples along with pieces recovered from the bottom of the Thames. But it allows us to consider the precariousness of pre-digital design. To digitally recreate a typeface or font (fonts being variations of a typeface) that can only be copied from printed sources, if those sources still exist, would be painstaking work. What if no one can be bothered?
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This 2013 blog post by Jim Felici lists “10 Display Faces that Digital Forgot”. Of the ten, at least one, Pssitt, has since been digitized and is freely available for download and use (according to Fonts in Use, this was done by Marine Stephane as a student art project in 2014). But just a shallow dig into this topic reveals a potential wealth of neglected fonts. Oscar, listed by Felici, was produced by the Fonderia Nebiolo in Turin, Italy. Their Wikipedia page lists 48 distinct typefaces. The Nebiolo History Project might be able to tell us what happened to them all; but alas, we have missed their conference, held in 2021.
It’s difficult to track down the names of more such typefaces, except in Quora posts, or via book recommendations in forum comments. Fonts in Use is a useful tool that certainly lists some non-digital fonts, but doesn’t seem to use a common tag that would allow us to produce an exclusive list of them.
Aside from the aesthetic pleasure derived from a beautiful set of letters, there is a lot of research out there on how fonts affect learning and perception. A couple of examples: “The Taste of Typeface” by Velasco et al. is an Open Access scholarly article that shows our brains may associate taste words with the shape of type. And for a deep dive into the legibility of different typefaces try this Open Access book (yes, a whole free book), The Legibility of Serif and Sans Serif Typefaces by John T. E. Richardson.
If you need me, I’ll be converting my CV and email signature into Pssitt.
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