Throwing Away a Legacy

In the quiet of a London evening in 1916, a solitary figure walked slowly across Hammersmith Bridge. He was old now, nearly seventy-six, and stooped under the weight of a parcel he cradled like something sacred. Below him, the Thames moved with the sleepy persistence of a river that had seen too much history to be surprised by anything. But what the man carried was not ordinary cargo. Wrapped carefully in brown paper was a handful of the most beautiful type ever cast in Britain. And he was about to throw it into the water.

Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson had once been a man of ideas, a philosopher and bookbinder turned typographic purist. At the turn of the 20th century, he joined forces with Emery Walker, a master printer, to create something transcendent—a press that could produce books as fine and restrained as illuminated manuscripts, without the ornamentation. It was a rebellion against the industrial age and its gaudy output: mass-market books churned out by the Linotype machine, efficient but soulless. Cobden-Sanderson and Walker longed for a return to craft, to beauty, to the integrity of the printed page.

Together, they founded the Doves Press in Hammersmith in 1900. Named for the nearby Dove Inn, it produced volumes that were stark in their beauty—no illustrations, no frills, only the finest handmade paper and the most meticulous printing. At the heart of it all was the Doves Type, a custom-designed font inspired by 15th-century Venetian printer Nicolas Jenson. It was quiet and graceful, every curve and serif a hymn to clarity and proportion. It wasn’t just a typeface—it was a philosophy.

But like many idealistic ventures, the Doves Press was not immune to the human friction beneath its lofty aspirations. Cobden-Sanderson was a purist and a perfectionist, rigid in his artistic convictions. Walker, while equally committed to quality, was more pragmatic. Their partnership frayed. In 1909, they agreed to part ways, with one critical stipulation: when Cobden-Sanderson died, ownership of the Doves Type would revert to Walker.

For Cobden-Sanderson, this clause became a torment. The idea that Walker—or worse, commercial printers—might one day use the Doves Type for purposes he couldn’t control gnawed at him. It wasn’t just a legal concern; it was spiritual. He had come to see the type not as a tool, but as an extension of his soul, and he would rather see it lost to time than defiled by lesser hands.

So he began a quiet campaign of destruction. Under cover of night, over the course of more than two years, he carried small bundles of type to the bridge and dropped them, piece by piece, into the river. He chronicled these trips in his diary with a sense of almost religious fulfillment. He referred to the type as his "child," and to the river as its final resting place. He disposed of over a ton of it—matrices, punches, sorts—every last letterform of the Doves Type was cast into the Thames.

When he died in 1922, the Doves Type was presumed extinct. No one would ever use it again.

But rivers remember.

In 2010, a typographer named Robert Green became obsessed with the Doves Type. He wanted to recreate it for the digital age and began studying every printed page the Press had ever issued. But something about the story wouldn’t let him go. He wondered: what if the type wasn’t entirely gone? In 2014, Green hired a team of divers and, using archival research and tidal charts, located the likely drop point. Incredibly, they found fragments of the original type beneath the bridge, still bearing the crisp impressions of Jenson’s legacy, dulled but not erased by the silt of a century.

The recovered pieces were digitized, and today, the Doves Type lives again—not as metal, but as code. It’s available to anyone, anywhere, a spectral rebirth Cobden-Sanderson would surely have loathed. Or perhaps not. Maybe some small part of him would appreciate the irony—that despite his fervent efforts, the beauty he tried to hide away found its way back into the world.

There’s something cautionary in the tale, not just about ego or artistic obsession, but about control. We all want our legacy to be handled a certain way. And we assume others will just “understand” our intentions, even when we haven’t clearly spelled them out.

Cobden-Sanderson had a legal agreement in place—but it wasn’t aligned with what he truly wanted. And because he hadn’t used the tools available to ensure those wishes were honored clearly and unambiguously, he spent the last years of his life trying to erase what he’d built, piece by piece, by hand, under cover of night.

In estate planning, the stakes are real and personal. We’re not just talking about who gets what—we’re talking about how your values, your creations, and your intentions are carried forward. That’s why wills and trusts matter. Not just to divide assets, but to provide clarity, continuity, and peace. They give you a structured, legally enforceable way to say: This is what matters to me. This is how I want it handled. This is how I want to be remembered.

Because if you don’t say it clearly, you leave others guessing. And guessing, more often than not, leads to conflict, confusion—or even to someone throwing your life’s work into a river.