Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I’ve been yearning for some good news because, let’s be honest, it’s been a week of achingly bad news.

Hurricane Ida, on steroids from climate change, ravages the southern and eastern seaboards. Misery stalks the streets of Afghanistan. Massive wildfires burn in the Sierras, spreading a smoky pall of devastation. The “Texas Taliban” imposes their own flavor of sharia law (it might be a different holy book, but it’s the same playbook). And the moral incongruity of preferring to commit assault rather than wear a mask, and preferring to take a horse dewormer after contracting COVID than to take a proven vaccine beforehand, continues to the march across our nation.

Personally, I’ve been swinging between depression and white-hot outrage, all with a big side serving of helpless futility.

To counter this (and to stay relatively sane), I’ve been focusing whenever possible on pleasant things.

One of those is the font called Doves Type.

Imagine coming across a news article that tells of a publisher who, in 1913, after a falling out with his business partner, began throwing into the Thames the punches and matrices for a font they had designed.

Now imagine reading further, of a digital font designer who, in 2013, in partnership with the Port of London Authority, sent divers down into the Thames to recover those same punches and matrices, lodged in the muck for a century, and used them to refine a digital reconstruction of the font.

This is the story of Doves Type, developed for Doves Press in the early 20th century.

The story captivated me, especially because the font is, to my eye, damned near perfect.

It’s a serifed font that is clear and easy to read, while also having a slightly antique feel. Mostly orthogonal, with strict stems, ascenders, arms, and bars, it also has dashes of the diagonal, such as the descenders for “y” and “g”. It has several stylistic ligature joins (e.g., in combinations such as “ff”, “ct”, etc.), and it has one of the best ampersands ever.

Before this week, I’d really only seen Doves Type used in examples from its website, but this week I was able to use it myself, as I have been typesetting a collection of my poetry.

And it is beautiful.

I know it’s super-nerdy to geek out over a font, but after this week, I’m taking goodness where I can find it. (You can check out the Doves Type font set for yourself at TypeSpec.)

It’s been a bad week, I know, and things aren’t looking to improve a whole lot in the near future, so do yourself a favor: take some time to seek the good things, the kind things, the inspiring things, because they absolutely do exist within our spheres. They’re out there, and they’re worth finding.

k