I need to negotiate some kind of separate license. For £40 I can install the font on my computer and print a million books using it, but if I want to issue an eBook of the exact same book, with the same layout, etc. The examples given for the digital embedding license are apps and eBooks. What I found really interesting was that they ask to be contacted directly if you want a larger online license or a ‘digital embedding license’. All of that seemed fairly standard to me, although I’m not an expert on fonts and I always thought it was a bit strange to price fonts for online use based on page views. The font is sold for £40 for a single user, £50 for 2-5 users (it’s reasonable that someone working on a book would need a license for more than one person), and the third option is £40 for 10,000 page views per month on a web site. Looking at the new font online, I noticed something interesting about the pricing. The pieces recovered from the river do not constitute the full range of characters from the typeface, but they do help provide more information about the typeface, and that information has been used by Green to enhance his digital version (he calls it a ‘digital facsimile’) of the font, named The Doves Type, which is available for sale online. The rest are likely encased in concrete, as the bridge the typeface was thrown over was bombed multiple times by the IRA, as far back as 1939 and as recently as 2000, and the bridge had to be repaired each time. After that discovery, he was able to get professional divers to search for the rest, where over 150 pieces were discovered. Figuring out where Cobden-Sanderson likely dropped the metal pieces into the river, he actually was able to find three pieces of the typeface himself on the water’s edge. Starting with copies of books published by Doves Press, reading the journals left behind by Cobden-Sanderson, and using research done by others on the topic, Green attempted to piece together a full copy of the typeface, as well as find the location of the lost original. The story became legend, and after a century, one designer, Robert Green, decided to try to resurrect the lost typeface. After hundreds of such trips, he managed to dispose of the entire typeface, leaving nothing for his partner upon his death. Over a period of years, he carried small amounts of the type to the Thames River and dumped them into the water. He decided to, frankly, screw his business partner out of his end of the deal. While that sounds reasonable, it wasn’t enough for Cobden-Sanderson that his font would never be mechanized in his lifetime. ![]() Cobden-Sanderson would retain full control of the font during his lifetime, and after he died Walker would gain complete control of it. Instead, they came to a different agreement. One partner wanted to sell the typeface (Walker), the other wanted to prevent it from being used in a mechanical press (Cobden-Sanderson). The Doves Press typeface was owned by both partners equally, but that created a big problem. A single font consisted of thousands of pounds of metal characters on small plates used to form the words that were printed. Fonts such as that used at Doves Press took years of planning and production time to create. ![]() We don’t think about how much time goes into designing them, especially since anyone who wants to can open up a computer program and create their own font. Today we think of fonts as digital files on a computer. When the publishing company ran into financial trouble, the partners fought over the single remaining asset of the company – the typeface. Paradise Lost, published by Doves Press ( The Met) Trouble Begins The company, Doves Press, created a new font (new, although based on a font from the 15th century) to be used in their publications, which included an edition of the Bible, as well as books by well-known authors such as John Milton, whose Paradise Lost published by Doves is nothing less than a masterpiece of bindery, before even getting to the contents. Two men founded a publishing company, one bringing the creative side (Thomas Cobden-Sanderson) and the other the money (Emery Walker). Recently I read about the resurrection of a font last used over a century ago. Part of the first page of the Doves Press edition of the Bible The over-use of Comic Sans or Papyrus fonts is not something that just bothers me. Reading badly laid out books can be painful (although my threshold is much higher than my friends who are typographers by trade). I appreciate a good font, and I certainly appreciate good typography.
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