[HN Gopher] Remnants of a legendary typeface have been rescued f...
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Remnants of a legendary typeface have been rescued from the Thames
Author : _emacsomancer_
Score : 377 points
Date : 2024-05-06 02:27 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.artnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.artnet.com)
| rudyfink wrote:
| That's cool. I admit hearing that story and thinking, "Is that
| how it happened? could a diver find it?" Apparently, they could!
| Great work on someone seeing it through.
| starkparker wrote:
| I remember the earlier story about the disposal and Robert
| Green's obsession with reviving it back in 2013 in The
| Economist[1]--at that time, "Intrepid fans have occasionally
| tried to recover pieces of the type from the river, but no one
| has ever found any"--so it's good to hear that the story didn't
| end there.
|
| [1]: https://www.economist.com/christmas-
| specials/2013/12/19/the-... (paywalled; https://archive.is/XfK1x)
| kens wrote:
| The recovery of the Doves typeface from the Thames was discussed
| on HN in 2015, so this story goes way back.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307
| beardyw wrote:
| Yes, very old news.
| 33282334 wrote:
| hek free
| dang wrote:
| Added to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40271786. Thanks!
| neilv wrote:
| > _"It is not that unusual to find pieces of type in the river,"
| Sandy said. "Particularly around Fleet Street, where newspaper
| typesetters would throw pieces in the water when they couldn't be
| bothered to put them back in their cases._
|
| Some assistant being lazy, or rushing to "finish" a task?
|
| Or sorts that broke, or were worn out, and it was normal to toss
| things into the river?
|
| Or a ritual? (Say, toss a sort into the river for the first page
| an apprentice sets, or when there's a press failure, or for
| superstition after printing very bad news?)
| timeon wrote:
| > it was normal to toss things into the river?
|
| It was normal. Rivers were used for dumping the garbage. In
| some places they still are. I know about instances in Europe
| where people dump their trash in streams behind the hamlet.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Semi related - the UK pouring sewage into its waterways has
| been front page news of late. It's up to 3.6 million hours of
| sewage discharge per year.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-62631320
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Franch put a lot of effort into rerouting old swears that
| dumped into the seine ahead of the up coming Olympics so
| they could hold events in the river
| daedalus_f wrote:
| When you say the UK, what you mean is a group of corrupt
| private companies that find it more convenient and cost
| friendly to dump raw sewage rather than correctly process
| it. I'm fairly sure the majority of people in the UK would
| be in favour of nationalising such companies and instead
| dumping their executives into the river instead [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V-Nwk9E1bs
| Piskvorrr wrote:
| Such as...in the Danube river O_O
|
| https://phys.org/news/2020-09-brown-danube-belgrade-
| sewers-t...
| dhosek wrote:
| One notable instance was "Bubbly Creek" in Chicago where the
| slaughterhouses dumped so much refuse in a tributary to the
| Chicago River that the water bubbled from the decay of the
| trash. The riverbed there is still polluted with toxic
| chemicals.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| It's STILL normal for people to litter and toss junk in rivers
| and culverts
| Animats wrote:
| The "modernized version", available as a font file, was
| modernized too much.[1] It doesn't look period.
|
| The H.P. Lovecraft Society has some 19th century fonts, if you
| need them.[2] Those were recovered from old documents.
|
| [1] https://typespec.co.uk/doves-type/
|
| [2] https://www.hplhs.org/resources.php
| zettabomb wrote:
| I'm curious what you mean by not looking "period". The HPLHS
| fonts frankly seem to just be _poor quality_ , rather than
| _old_. If you look at the images of the original type, Doves
| appears to be quite faithful to the original. Perhaps it 's
| worth noting that we still use typefaces remarkably similar to
| the Romans, particularly Times New Roman, which despite its
| many shortcomings retains a "modern" look by virtue of still
| being in use.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| They are intended to be of historically appropriate quality,
| for use in creating period versimilitude:
|
| > Many of these fonts have slightly rough edges or irregular
| shapes, to capture the feel of old lead type and bygone
| printing technologies
| zettabomb wrote:
| Not all documents from the time period would've had such
| low quality though, and not everyone would want such
| quality in a modern document. If you want such an effect,
| it's always possible to add it later, but it's rather more
| difficult to remove it if it's baked into the font file.
| vargr616 wrote:
| Roman type has roots in Italian printing of the late 15th and
| early 16th centuries, but Times New Roman's design has no
| connection to Rome or to the Romans.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_New_Roman
| zettabomb wrote:
| I'll admit I'm no typeface expert, but this seems to miss
| the point. Wikipedia's own page on Roman type [0] says
| "Roman type was modelled from a European scribal manuscript
| style of the 15th century, based on the pairing of
| inscriptional capitals used in ancient Rome with
| Carolingian minuscules". And visually, there's clearly an
| influence, though many centuries removed. My point is
| merely these very old typefaces remain modern looking
| because we still use similar ones today.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_type
| garciansmith wrote:
| The capital letters were indeed inspired by Roman
| monumental inscriptions. But all the lower case forms
| were taken from Carolingian designs. Humanists wanted to
| copy Roman forms to go back to what they saw as writing
| uncontaminated with medieval influence, but the texts of
| Roman authors they used to do so were not actually
| written by Romans but copied by Carolingian-era scribes.
| It's why its generally much easier for us to read ninth-
| century texts than, say, earlier (e.g., Merovingian
| chancery script, yikes) and later scribal hands (e.g.,
| late medieval Gothic).
| CPLX wrote:
| It was created by the descendants of the Romans, in the
| same physical location as Ancient Rome, and based on the
| numerous examples of letters that were still around on
| Roman buildings.
|
| If that is "no connection" what exactly would a
| "connection" look like?
| WillAdams wrote:
| Look up the history of how Stanley Morison and Victor
| Lardent created Times New Roman for _The Times_.
|
| The connection you are looking for is covered by Fra.
| Edward Catich in his books, and carried forward digitally
| in Carol Twombly's Trajan.
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| This has so much of what I (as an outsider) love about the UK.
| The love of typography & general design chops, mudlarks, art and
| design in public life, the spirit of enquiry and adventure and,
| the presence of people in the bureaucracy and elsewhere who
| recognize whimsy and put institutional resources behind that
| pursuit.
| unraveller wrote:
| Doves is insanely easy on the eyes despite so much going on.
| There is also mebinac[1] an unauthorized contemporary take on the
| original doves. Mebinac doesn't leap off the page as well yet
| deals with modern punctuation in a more normal way.
|
| Personally you can freely use them to great affect in your RSS
| reader or mail app that you read everyday.
|
| [1] https://fontsme.com/mebinac.font
| stevefolta wrote:
| I tried looking at code in Mebinac, and was surprised at how
| strongly it reminded me of old screenshots of Smalltalk.
| dkga wrote:
| This font is beautiful, thanks for sharing.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Thanks!, hadn't come across Mebinac. It's quite good!
|
| I'm also a big fan of Igino Marini's recreation of the Fell
| typefaces:
|
| _The Fell Types took their name from John Fell, a Bishop of
| Oxford in the seventeenth-century. Not only he created an
| unique collection of printing types but he started one of the
| most important adventures in the history of typography._ --
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240128075552/https://iginomari...
|
| The IM Fell fonts themselves seem to live on Google Fonts these
| days: https://fonts.google.com/?query=Igino+Marini
|
| I use Doves Type for... _everything_. One day I started to find
| my monomaniacal obsession a bit funny and sort of to spite
| myself I set _every_ font in Firefox to Doves Type. Serif,
| sans-serif, monospace, no other fonts allowed, _as well as the
| UI font_ by tweaking the Firefox user profile iirc.
|
| And it was just... very good. And I kept using it.
|
| I use Doves Type for everything, and to be able to do that on
| my phone I use iFont: https://apps.apple.com/is/app/ifont-find-
| install-any-font/id...
|
| Or yeah I do use IBM PC VGA 9x16, IBM BIOS 8x8, and Eagle
| Spirit PC CGA Board Alternate 3 a little :) From the Ultimate
| Oldschool PC Font Pack: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/
|
| I even munged together a combination of Doves Type Regular and
| IM Fell Great Primer Italic that matches the character scale
| and linespacing to both each other and to the IBM PC VGA 9x16
| font at 1:1 size. The open-source FontForge did the trick!:
| https://fontforge.org/en-US/
|
| (FontForge can autogenerate italics for any font. If you're
| bored, I suggest loading up the classic VGA font and pressing
| the _ITALICIZE_ button on ot. It's... interesting!)
|
| In general, on Windows I much prefer MacType's fomt rendering:
| https://www.mactype.net ... it's kind of amazing that this kind
| of surgery is even possible.
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| Curious what you did in FontForge to merge IM Fell Great
| Primer Italics into Doves Type Regular. (As I'd very much
| like to use Doves, e.g., for an e-reader font, but I do want
| to have italics for such purposes.)
|
| I made a native attempt in FontForge (just doing 'merge
| fonts'), which (unsurprisingly) didn't work.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| It's a bit of a blackout when I try to recall it, haha. I
| should figure it out and write it up.
|
| If it's useful: As far as I can recall it involved simply
| changing the font family to match, i.e. "Dovesfell", and
| then exporting the regular and the italic. The OS font
| system then figures out that they belong together.
|
| The scale is slightly different and the linespacing too.
| Did like a 90% rescale on one and 95% on the other? And
| then there was something to change in the Metrics window to
| make the linespacing identical.
| dovesseeker wrote:
| I've become enamored of this typeface as well as of this
| morning, moved even if I'm honest, but I'm having trouble
| finding one that looks as nice as the bible page sample in
| the OP. I made this account here just to ask; which version
| have you been using, and where did you get it?
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| I bought it from Typespec :)
| criddell wrote:
| When you are looking for a font, how can you know which
| grapheme clusters have glyphs? Is there some classification
| system for fonts that let you know how complete they are?
| eslaught wrote:
| https://wakamaifondue.com/
| _emacsomancer_ wrote:
| A discussion of other digitisations:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220705070449/http://luc.devroy...
| marviel wrote:
| On "unauthorized" -- how would this not be public domain at
| this point?
| tasuki wrote:
| Unauthorized doesn't mean it isn't in the public domain. It
| means there was no authorization.
| marviel wrote:
| Certainly -- I'm just not sure who would "authorize" it in
| the first place.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Copyright doesn't apply to typefaces. https://en.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others? I think there were others.
|
| _The lost Doves Press typeface and its revival (2015)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791125 - Aug 2019 (9
| comments)
|
| _How the Doves Type Was Nearly Lost_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476579 - Sept 2016 (44
| comments)
|
| _One man 's obsession with rediscovering the Doves typeface_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9951869 - July 2015 (32
| comments)
|
| _Lost typeface printing blocks found in river Thames_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017307 - Feb 2015 (22
| comments)
|
| _The fight over the Doves: A legendary typeface gets a second
| life_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964013 - Dec 2013
| (12 comments)
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| There were many more, but these were all dang could find after
| pg threw them in the river.
| jprd wrote:
| I spittaked coffee all over my monitor just now. I know this
| sounds like a Reddit comment, but I couldn't help but big-up
| your joke. Well played.
| raldi wrote:
| I'm left wanting to hear more about the motivation for dumping
| the type in the first place. What kind of swindle was suspected?
| Did the partner try to reconstruct the type?
| surfingdino wrote:
| https://youtu.be/e8harWbZN6U?si=4D5ZDCn2WLlciy5T&t=1002
| riwsky wrote:
| Thames New Roman
| surfingdino wrote:
| You win the Internet today :-)
| rayiner wrote:
| Whoever downvoted this has no soul.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| >pun >you win the internet >downvote
|
| It is against the rules to tell you which rule you are
| breaking. hint hint.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Don't disrespect the downvote-a-bot !
|
| What's you expecting a soul for?
| morrbo wrote:
| We actually have this. Obviously not this particular font. My
| family were all printers and I've sort of inherited a huge
| cabinet full of old school typefaces all carved out of some
| special kind of hard wood - pear wood - all over 100 years old.
| Absolutely 0 idea what we can do with it, but it's all hand made
| and very cool. Felt pertinet to share lol
| 317070 wrote:
| Maybe drop Robert Green (the man behind this article) an email
| on: https://typespec.co.uk/custom-font-services/
| bradrn wrote:
| Klim Type Foundry [1] may also be worth a contact -- they've
| been inspired by woodcut type before (e.g. [2] [3]), so I
| wonder if they might be interested in knowing about this.
|
| [1] https://klim.co.nz/
|
| [2] https://klim.co.nz/blog/maelstrom-design-information/
|
| [3] https://klim.co.nz/blog/manuka-design-information/
| JNRowe wrote:
| We've had centuries of embankment works along the Thames1, a fair
| bit concentrated around the areas you'd expect to find type like
| this2. There must be a phenomenal amount of history that was
| purposely covered around there. Given the scale of the works
| you'd have to imagine there is a significant chunk of non-London
| history to be found there too(the scale of granite imports from
| Cornwall being an obvious example).
|
| I'm less optimistic about the possibility of more large scale
| digs though, as the Golden Jubilee bridge history3 points out the
| area is an also an exciting zone for stumbling in to unexploded
| ordnance and you always seem to be within few metres of a tube
| line or Victorian sewer.
|
| [It is the reason I _love_ those plucky Crossrail4 developers who
| 've felt the anger from the havoc they've left across London over
| the few past decades. We get incredible large scale engineering
| works to lust over, coupled with really wacky archaeological digs
| tagging along for the ride.]
|
| 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embanking_of_the_tidal_Thames
|
| 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Embankment - Both the
| "home" of the type in Hammersmith and Fleet were the targets of
| embankment work in the 19th century
|
| 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_Bridge_and_Golden_J...
|
| 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail
| lostlogin wrote:
| On a trip to London and having heard of mudlarking, I walked in
| one of the 'beaches'. I immediately found an old belt belt
| buckle and about 20 stems from old clay pipes.
|
| My father found a 17th century cork screw.
|
| There must be an absolute wealth of finds along its banks.
| baerrie wrote:
| Nicola White documents here interesting mudlarking adventures on
| youtube, I recommend it!
| https://youtu.be/rVxncipNvvY?si=1DGluOHT8T5fRNfE
| komali2 wrote:
| I'm wryly curious why fonts are among the odd things that really
| get the goat of us turbo-nerds on forums like HN.
| mihaic wrote:
| When you spend most of your day staring at text on a screen,
| the minutia of how that text looks like become very important.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| The centuries-old artistry of mass reproduction of thought
| has many wonderful minutiae!, as high technology often does.
| Biganon wrote:
| It has just the right balance of technology, art, history, and
| trivia fun facts. Makes it one of the best topics for us nerds.
|
| Also, programmers spend a huge fraction of their time reading.
| Reading code, reading docs, reading reading reading. Fonts are
| important for us from an ergonomic point of view (and it's also
| a matter of taste and aesthetics!)
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| Agreed, same reason the Monaspace font 1.1 release made news:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40267120
| mihaic wrote:
| PSA for the inspiration for this font, the great Nicolas Jenson,
| who around 1470 had pretty much perfected the latin typeface.
|
| Later, more famous types, such as Caslon or Garamond, are just
| variations on this.
| dhosek wrote:
| Not really. Jenson's typeface (modern revivals include
| Montype's Centaur and Adobe Jenson) retained a lot of
| calligraphic features which figure less in later faces.
| Garamond is much more of a _type_ design than lettering in type
| and Caslon is wholly typographic in its nature.
| rawling wrote:
| Curious as to why this refers to recovering the type being
| important to creating a digital version of the typeface, when
| lower in the article it shows that there is a surviving bible.
| Couldn't that have already been used to reproduce the font?
| wrp wrote:
| Due to irregular spreading of the ink when printing, the shapes
| on the page are not perfect representations of the type shape,
| so the true shape of the metal form has to be inferred from
| comparing multiple printed samples.
|
| There are digital reproductions of old typefaces that try to
| reproduce the actual weight on the page, but they seem to be
| not very popular with modern designers unless they are going
| for a deliberately archaic look.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I'd expect the original designers to know and consider that
| effect, and make the types slightly thiner, so the printed
| version looks as intended.
| wrp wrote:
| They did and that is a huge point of contention in the
| revival of classic typefaces. In the 1970s, there was a
| massive push to digitize existing founts, but the type
| companies did it by tracing the metal rather than the
| prints. The result was digital fonts that printed much
| lighter than the original metal type. Most digitizations of
| early 20th-century typefaces you can find have this
| problem.
|
| By the late 1970s, people began to pay more heed to the
| actual printed shapes. I like early 20th-century
| typographic style and am always on the lookout for good
| type reproductions, but there are two other factors that
| come into play. One is that a font designed to look a
| certain way when press-printed won't look quite the same
| coming out of your laser printer. The other is that modern
| taste is for thinner lines. When I use a revival of a
| classic type, I want it to look at it did back when, but
| apparently I'm in the minority.
| rozab wrote:
| The worst symptom of this imo is the inclusion of ink
| traps in digital fonts. I think they look awful,
| especially when blown up to poster size.
| dhosek wrote:
| The problem is not the ink traps but the lack of optical
| scaling.
| dhosek wrote:
| It's also a matter of printing technology, letterpress,
| vs offset. The latter tends to have less ink spread. It's
| also a matter of printing on dry vs damp paper
| (letterpress works best on slightly dampened sheets of
| paper which contributes to the ink spread). Then there
| are things like subtle curves that don't digitize well
| (digital Optima is a poor approximation of the original
| analog letterforms).
| wrp wrote:
| There was also a revival of the Doves type made by Torbjorn
| Olsson in 1994. It is no longer available, but you can find the
| old specimen PDF at the Internet Archive and extract the embedded
| fonts. The weight is a bit lighter than the Robert Green version,
| but also has an italic face.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20121127135748/home1.swipnet.se/...
| KaiserPro wrote:
| You might also like "Zilvertype" which is from the dutch font
| school of roughly the same time.
| https://www.alphabettes.org/zilvertype/
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Again? I swear this happened about a decade ago. Yeah, here it
| is: https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/15/lost-typeface-rediscovered-
| al...
|
| EDIT: It's the same typeface.
| pimlottc wrote:
| There's a great episode of the Futility Closet podcast about the
| Doves Type and the dispute that lead to it being dumped into the
| Thames:
|
| https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/09/04/podcast-episode-16...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Thames Old Roman?
| ada1981 wrote:
| Wild they didn't include an example of the actual typeface in the
| article.
|
| Also, I'm curious how there were 500,000 pieces in the typeface.
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