The original Doves type was crafted by punchcutter Edward Prince from drawings of Nicolas Jenson's 15th-century Venetian typeface. There were a number of recreations of Jenson's type during this time period, William Morris's "Golden" type among them, but Doves is considered to be the most faithful to the original Venetian forms.
Doves was created for The Dove Press in 1899 and the press was very successful, fully selling out printings of its work before they were even produced. Not long after the turn of the century though, the partners in the press, Emery Walker and Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson had a falling out and the press closed. Their terms of contract specified that Walker should have possession of the type should the business dissolve. Cobden-Sanderson could not bear the though of someone else using 'his' type, and over the course of 5 years, starting in 1913, he made hundreds nightime trips to the closed shop, each time taking away more of the type and matrices to dump in the Thames. By January of 1917, the deed was complete. The Doves type was gone, seemingly forever.
A century later, Doves lives again, now in digital form, thanks to the research and painstaking efforts of Robert Green from Typspec.
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