From Cautionary Tales: Dangerously Near to Absolute Perfection
Heavyweight
Pushkin Industries
4.9 • 18.6K Ratings
🗓️ 16 December 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We've got a special episode from our friends at Cautionary Tales, another Pushkin podcast. On Cautionary Tales, economist and author Tim Harford shares stories of awful human error, tragic catastrophes, daring heists and hilarious fiascos. They’ll delight you and scare you—but also make you wiser.
In the 1880s, two friends in the flourishing Arts and Crafts Movement in London share a vision: to print the ultimate edition of the Bible. Together they create Doves Press, and its unique font, Doves. But in their quest to make something beautiful, the friends spiral towards an act of incredible ugliness. It's a story of how different perspectives can cause bitter rifts between even the closest of friends.
Listen to more episodes of Cautionary Tales (00:10) wherever you get podcasts.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.1 | Hi, Jonathan here. |
| 0:06.1 | Did you know you can listen to heavyweight on Amazon Music? |
| 0:09.3 | And you can listen to your favorite podcasts in the app |
| 0:12.1 | so you can do all of your listening in one place. |
| 0:15.3 | Plus, Amazon Prime members get access to the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts. |
| 0:21.7 | To start listening, download the Amazon Music app, search for heavyweight, and click |
| 0:27.0 | follow to keep up with new episodes. |
| 0:29.7 | You can also ask Alexa. |
| 0:31.4 | Alexa, play heavyweight on Amazon Music. |
| 0:40.3 | Pushkin. |
| 0:42.9 | Hey everyone, Jonathan here. |
| 0:45.8 | You know, on heavyweight, we often talk with people about mistakes they've made. |
| 0:51.5 | And there's another show on the Pushkin Network called Cautionary Tales |
| 0:55.2 | that also wades into those waters about human errors. But it comes at it from a kind of |
| 1:02.8 | historical perspective. It's hosted by economist and author Tim Harford. Tim covers all kinds of |
| 1:10.6 | story-worthy moments, sometimes tragic ones, |
| 1:14.9 | you know, like plane crashes and shipwrecks and collapsing dance floors to kind of show you |
| 1:20.5 | what went wrong. And today I was going to play you a favorite episode of mine. It's just about |
| 1:26.7 | regular people in a way, just making very poor decisions. |
| 1:31.6 | It's a story about two men, their book publishing company, and the font that destroyed their friendship. |
... |
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