The English Bible, Containing the Old Testament and the New

Five plain, unillustrated quarto volumes, printed in red and black between 1903 and 1905 at the Doves Press in Hammersmith, and generally regarded as the masterpiece of the private press movement's most austere maker. The one ornament in the whole Bible, a single elongated red initial hand-lettered by Edward Johnston at the opening of Genesis, sits on a page otherwise built from nothing but type, ink and margin.

The press's two founders, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson and Sir Emery Walker, fell out bitterly within a few years of finishing it. Rather than let a dissolution agreement hand the Doves Type to Walker on his own death, Cobden-Sanderson spent years secretly throwing the type, piece by piece, into the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge, an act he recorded in his own diary and that left the typeface unusable for nearly a century, until a graphic designer working from those same diary entries had part of it dredged back up from the riverbed in 2014.

This particular copy is identified, on the Library of Congress's own authority, as part of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, now held in the Library's Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Its life before it reached that collection, who first owned it and when Rosenwald acquired it, is not documented in the sources this record could consult, and the record says so plainly rather than inventing a chain to fill the gap.

A Bible built from nothing but type and paper

Five quarto volumes, printed in red and black, bound in limp vellum with the title lettered in gilt directly on the spine: that is the entire visual vocabulary of the Doves Bible. There is no woodcut, no historiated border, no illustration of any kind across all five volumes, an absence that was a stated principle rather than an economy. Five hundred sets were printed on handmade paper and two on vellum. The paper copies are what nearly every surviving example, including this one, represents; sources consulted for this record do not specify whether the Library of Congress copy is paper or one of the two vellum sets, and that gap is recorded rather than guessed at.

The single ornamental gesture in the entire Bible is calculated rather than decorative: an elongated calligraphic initial I, lettered in red by Edward Johnston, that runs the height of the opening page of Genesis beside the words IN THE BEGINNING. Bernard Newdigate's contemporary description of the Doves initials as spare geometric forms rather than illuminated ornament is echoed by later cataloguers who call the page one of the most powerful title openings in the history of printing. It is powerful because it is nearly bare. Everything else on the page is the type, the margin, and the black-and-red printing.

Cobden-Sanderson before the Press

Thomas James Sanderson was born in Alnwick, Northumberland, in 1840, trained in law at Trinity College, Cambridge, and practiced as a barrister for two decades before abandoning the bar around 1884, in his mid-forties, for bookbinding. In 1882 he had married Anne Cobden, daughter of the free-trade politician Richard Cobden; the couple took the combined surname Cobden-Sanderson, and Anne's independent means underwrote his change of career and, later, the founding of the press itself.

He set up the Doves Bindery in Hammersmith in 1893, naming it, as he would later name the press, after a local public house, the Dove. His binding work brought him into the circle of the Arts and Crafts movement and into direct contact with William Morris, whose Kelmscott Press had begun printing three years earlier. Cobden-Sanderson bound Kelmscott books; the two men's aesthetics would diverge sharply once he began designing type of his own.

A philosophy stated in print before it was printed

Cobden-Sanderson did not arrive at the Doves Type by trial alone. In 1892 he delivered a paper to the Art Workers' Guild that he later expanded and printed at his own press in February 1901 as The Ideal Book, or Book Beautiful, an edition of 310 copies, 300 on paper and 10 on vellum. The tract states his position directly: a book's beauty is composite, arising from the interaction of its literary content, its writing or type, its printing, its illustration if any, and its binding, and it can be made beautiful either by the harmony of all these parts together or by the supreme beauty of one part allowed to dominate.

He used that essay to state, in print, a direct critique of Morris's own Kelmscott books: their narrow margins, their heavy black-letter type, and their subordination of the printed text to border ornament. The Doves Press was his counter-proposal. Where Kelmscott surrounded its type with pattern, Doves surrounded its type with air: wide margins, a single clean roman face, no border, no illustration. This is a documented position, argued by Cobden-Sanderson himself in a published tract before the Bible was printed, not a later scholar's reading of the finished object back onto its maker.

The Doves Type

The type at the center of all of this was designed by Cobden-Sanderson working with Emery Walker, who joined him as a formal partner in 1900 and financed and technically directed the type's creation, and cut by the punchcutter Edward Prince, the same craftsman who had earlier cut Morris's Golden Type for Kelmscott. The Doves Roman took its model from Venetian printing of the 1470s: capitals derived from Nicolas Jenson's roman, lowercase from the related type of Jacobus Rubeus, both examined by Walker through photographic enlargements of early printed pages, a method Walker had used before for Morris.

The result was a single size of roman type with no italic and, by design, no companion display face, cut in one weight for one purpose: to set continuous text with nothing standing between the reader and the words. Contemporaries and later type historians alike treat the Doves Roman as one of the most disciplined revivals of the private press movement, precisely because Walker and Prince worked from photographic evidence of real Renaissance printing rather than freely reinterpreting it.

Printing the Bible, 1903-1905

The Doves Bible was the press's largest undertaking and, by near-universal agreement among the institutions and dealers who now hold copies, its masterpiece. The text was set from F.H.A. Scrivener's Paragraph Bible, with Cobden-Sanderson himself responsible for breaking the King James text into sense-paragraphs rather than printing it in the conventional numbered-verse grid, a real editorial decision about how the reader should encounter continuous scripture rather than a lookup table of chapter and verse.

Printing ran across five volumes issued between 1903 and 1905 in an edition of 500 sets on handmade paper and 2 on vellum, a print run tiny by any commercial standard but large for a hand press operating without power machinery. Johnston's initials, most famously the Genesis I, were not printed with the text but lettered by hand afterward in red, a workflow that made every volume, in that one respect, a manuscript addition to a printed book rather than a purely mechanical object. When Cobden-Sanderson received Johnston's design for the Genesis opening, he recorded in his journal that he was now, finally, satisfied with all their books, a private note of completion from a man who was rarely satisfied with anything, including, within a few years, his own partnership.

The partnership and its dissolution

Walker's formal role began in 1900, though the two men had worked together informally before that, and the arrangement was never an equal division of labour: Cobden-Sanderson pressed and bound; Walker, already established as a photo-engraver and the technical eye behind Morris's own type designs, supplied the scholarship, the photographic method, and much of the capital standing behind the type. Cobden-Sanderson increasingly felt he was not getting adequate working support from a partner whose attention was divided among several other ventures and public roles.

The partnership was dissolved amid considerable bitterness by around 1908-1909; sources consulted give both years, and this record does not resolve the discrepancy beyond noting it. The dissolution agreement contained the clause that would detonate a few years later: on Cobden-Sanderson's death, all rights to the Doves Type, punches, matrices and the type itself, were to pass to Walker. Cobden-Sanderson had designed and financed the letter that made the press's reputation, and the agreement he had signed meant his estranged former partner would inherit it whole.

Destruction: the punches and matrices, then the type itself

Cobden-Sanderson decided that Walker would inherit nothing. Rather than let the type pass to a man he now regarded as an adversary, he began systematically destroying it himself, in secret, over a period of years, recording the act as he went in his own diary. Accounts consulted for this record differ on the exact chronology: some place an initial disposal of the punches and matrices as early as Good Friday, 21 March 1913; the fullest published accounts of the diary place the sustained destruction of the type itself in the second half of the decade, beginning at midnight on 31 August 1916, a date Cobden-Sanderson recorded as one that 'seemed a suitable night, and time.'

From that night through into 1917 he made repeated trips, commonly given as around 170, on foot across Hammersmith Bridge, carrying paper parcels of type tied with string and dropping them into the Thames below, a stretch of river he could see from the windows of his own house and workshop at Hammersmith Terrace. He described the act in his diary as bequeathing the type to the river. Estimates of the total metal destroyed run to roughly a ton, with one detailed account putting the figure at 2,600 pounds. He also destroyed the tools and jigs needed to recut the letter, so that even a determined attempt to reconstruct the punches from scratch would have had almost nothing physical to work from.

This was not an accident of an old man clearing out a workshop. It was a deliberate, nightly, years-long act aimed at a single outcome: that Emery Walker, and no one else, would never again set a line of Doves type. Cobden-Sanderson died in 1922, six years into the disposal and long after its completion; Walker outlived him by over a decade, dying in 1933, having inherited, in the end, nothing of the type at all.

A century of silence and a digital attempt

For most of the twentieth century the Doves Type existed only as ink on the page of the roughly fifty books the press had printed between 1900 and 1916, and as a cautionary story in the history of British printing. Robert Green, a London graphic designer who had been drawn to the letter since encountering it in art school in the early 2000s, spent around three years working from printed specimens to redraw the Doves Roman as a digital font, releasing a first version in 2013. He was not satisfied with its accuracy against the original metal, which he had never seen and had assumed no one ever would again.

The 2014 recovery

In October 2014, working from Cobden-Sanderson's own diary entries recording where along the river he had made his drops, Green obtained a mudlarking permit and found three lowercase sorts, the letters v, i and e, on the Thames foreshore near Hammersmith Bridge at low tide. He then arranged for the Port of London Authority to send a professional diving team to the same stretch of riverbed. Over a main operation on 10 November 2014 and a further day of diving, the divers recovered a total reported as 147 to 151 individual pieces of type, the sources consulted give both figures and this record does not adjudicate between them, out of an original casting that once ran to hundreds of thousands of sorts. The recovery was filmed by the documentary maker Toby Amies.

Green used the recovered originals to correct and finish a more accurate digital revival of the Doves Type, released after the dive. Of the physical pieces recovered, a portion was donated to the Emery Walker Trust, which maintains Walker's former house at 7 Hammersmith Terrace, a short walk from the bridge, as a small recompense, as one account of the recovery put it, for Cobden-Sanderson's original act against Walker. Separately from Green's PLA-organized dive, individual mudlarks searching the same stretch of foreshore under license have continued to find further pieces in the years since; one licensed mudlark alone is reported to have recovered more than 500 additional sorts, recorded through the Portable Antiquities Scheme and in at least one case donated to the Emery Walker Trust in December 2020. Recovered fragments have also been shown to the public: pieces of Dove type dredged from the river were on display in the Museum of London Docklands' 'Secrets of the Thames' exhibition as of August 2025.

This record was briefed with a claim that recovered type is now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Searches of the sources above, of the V&A's own online collections search, and of general web search turned up no reporting or catalogue record placing any of the recovered Doves Type at the V&A; every account located instead names the Emery Walker Trust as the recipient institution, with pieces also exhibited at the Museum of London Docklands. This record therefore states the Emery Walker Trust and the Museum of London Docklands as the documented holders and declines to repeat the V&A claim. See notes to the editor.

This copy: the Library of Congress and the Rosenwald Collection

The Library of Congress's own 'World Treasures: Beginnings' exhibition identifies its copy of the Doves Bible as part of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, held in the Library's Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and it is this copy that the Commons photograph anchoring this record reproduces; the image file is served directly from the Library's own exhibits server. The Library's digitized version of the same Bible carries the accession stem 'rosen2243' across its five separately digitized volumes, which corroborates the Rosenwald attribution independently of the exhibition caption.

Lessing J. Rosenwald, chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Company from 1932 to 1939, built his rare book collection over roughly forty years and announced in 1943, at the height of the Second World War, that he would give his entire graphic arts collection, together with everything he acquired afterward, to the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art. He kept physical custody of the books at his own Alverthorpe Gallery on his estate in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, for the rest of his life, with the collection reaching the Library in a series of gifts beginning in 1943 and culminating in a final delivery in 1980, the year after his death in 1979. Which of those gift tranches carried this particular Bible, and from whom and when Rosenwald himself acquired it, is not stated in the sources consulted for this record; that gap is recorded honestly in the open questions below rather than filled with an assumed date.

What other copies have sold for, and why that is not this copy's price

The Library of Congress copy came to the institution as a gift, not a purchase, and no sale of this specific set is documented in the sources consulted; there is accordingly no auction result to report for the object this record describes. Other copies of the same 500-set edition do come to market with some regularity and establish a comparanda cohort worth recording precisely because it is easy to confuse with this copy if the two are not kept separate.

A set with a documented ownership chain through the collector Templeton Crocker, a past president of the California Historical Society, then the Julia Scribner Bigham Memorial Collection at St. Mark's Library, then a collector named L.W. Jordan, Jr., sold at Bonhams in a sale running 15 to 25 June 2024 for a hammer price of USD 9,000, USD 11,520 with buyer's premium, described as showing occasional foxing concentrated in volume four and light wear to its custom slipcases. A separate set was offered at Sotheby's on 11 July 2024 with an estimate of GBP 7,000 to 9,000; the result was not available in the sources consulted, which noted only that results required a login this record's research did not have access to. Neither of these two sets is the Library of Congress copy, and nothing in their sale descriptions is transferred to it here.

What remains open

The record above is deliberately more definite about the press, the type, and the destruction than it is about this one copy's own life before it reached Washington. That asymmetry is real: the Doves Press kept records of its own output and Cobden-Sanderson kept a diary of his own crime against his former partner, so those events are unusually well documented for a private press story. The path of one particular Bible from a Hammersmith printing house in 1903-1905 into the hands of a Philadelphia-area collector by some point before 1980 is not.