Over a year ago, I was emailing with my friend Toby Wolpe, a fellow tech writer/editor who lived outside London. I thought I might get to London in 2025, and was checking on his plans. In his reply, he said all plans were off: he had a fatal illness, and it was a matter of likely several months. I wrote back in sympathy and thanked him for his friendship.
I don’t know the rest of his family, so had no loop to be kept in; every month or two, I would look for news. Just a few days ago, I learned he had passed away in September via a posting at the local athletic club at which he was very active and clearly much loved.
Toshi Omagari (left) and Toby Wolpe at The Type Archive in London, 2017
Toby and I met because I admired the work of his father, Berthold Wolpe, so much. Berthold (1905–1989) designed a few typefaces, one of which has had a large impact on English culture and book design, Albertus. He designed piles of book covers and taught and wrote about handwriting and calligraphy, among many other things.
I can’t recall how Toby and I first connected—possibly on Twitter, when I posted my excitement about an exhibition at the now-shuttered Type Archive on Berthold, featuring artifacts and book covers and much more. We began to correspond and made plans to meet in late 2017 at the exhibition at The Type Archive, where I had connected with the late Sue Shaw (1932–2020) for a tour. Toshi Omagari, who had revived Wolpe’s faces for Monotype, met me with Sue, and then Toshi and I went off later in the day with Toby. We roamed around the city, taking buses, walking, going to a pub, a restaurant. A wonderful time.
When I was back in London in 2018, we connected again, and he took me for a great ramble in the City of London, including through the Inns of the Court, about which he knew a great deal. An excellent conversationalist, I can’t recall all of what we discussed, just how delightful it was. I missed him on a 2023 London trip, when he was out of the country. We kept in touch from time to time via email, and I had looked forward to more conversation.
Toshi (front) and Toby, Sue, and me (from left, rear) in the kitchen at The Type Archive, 2017
Toby spent most of his life writing about technology and running publication teams as an editor. I gathered he was good at it and quite engrossed in his work, but it formed little of what we discussed in person and in email. He clearly loved history (particularly London’s), music, and literature.
His childhood and some later years are preserved to some extent in books about his parents in which he is interviewed and featured: Berthold Wolpe: The Total Man and Margaret Wolpe: The Curious Maker, both by Phil Cleaver.
Toby told me one story that I can’t find any further details about, that his father was wandering through London years after the Blitz, and saw workmen removing doors from what had been Charles Darwin’s house. He offered them a fiver to buy them, and somehow got them home on the Tube and a train, to their home in East Sussex. How, Toby had no idea, but that kind of arrangement was typical of his father.
Then Toby dropped the fact that his father installed the doors on their home—the one Toby and his wife now lived in. Though invited, I was never able to see Darwin’s doors, nor have another ramble with Toby.
