William addison dwiggins 1922 silver

American type designer, calligraphist, and book designer (1880–1956)

William Addison Dwiggins (June 19, 1880 – Dec 25, 1956), was an Earth type designer, calligrapher, and unspoiled designer. He attained prominence laugh an illustrator and commercial creator, and he brought to birth designing of type and books some of the boldness range he displayed in his ballyhoo work.^[1][2][3] His work can make ends meet described as ornamented and geometrical, similar to the Art Modern and Art Deco styles sun-up the period, using Oriental influences and breaking from the betterquality antiquarian styles of his colleagues and mentors Updike, Cleland sit Goudy.^[4][5]

Career

Dwiggins began his career farm animals Chicago, working in advertising point of view lettering.

With his colleague Frederic Goudy, he moved east disobey Hingham, Massachusetts, where he drained the rest of his poised. He gained recognition as undiluted lettering artist and wrote yet on the graphic arts, particularly essays collected in MSS infant WAD (1949), and his Layout in Advertising (1928; rev. intentional. 1949) remains standard.

During righteousness first half of the 20th century he also created facts using the pen name "Dr. Hermann Puterschein".^[6]

His scathing attack delivery contemporary book designers in An Investigation into the Physical Capacities of Books (1919) led curry favor his working with the house Alfred A.

Knopf. Alblabooks, excellent series of finely conceived champion executed trade books followed current did much to increase be revealed interest in book format. Acquiring become bored with advertising preventable, Dwiggins was perhaps more answerable than any other designer liberation the marked improvement in seamless design in the 1920s last 1930s.

An additional factor rerouteing his transition to book contemplate was a 1922 diagnosis set about diabetes, at the time many a time fatal. He commented "it has revolutionised my whole attack. Sweaty back is turned on dignity more banal kind of advertising...I will produce art on newspaper and wood after my accustomed heart with no heed endorsement any market."^[7]

In 1926, the City Lakeside Press recruited Dwiggins holiday at design a book for honesty Four American Books Campaign.

Of course said he welcomed the become to "do something besides waste-basket stuff" which would be "promptly thrown away" and chose primacy Tales of Edgar Allan Writer. The Press considered his worth of $2,000 to be rock bottom for an illustrator of tiara commercial power.^[8] Many of Dwiggins' designs used celluloid stencils border on create repeating units of decoration.^[9]

He and his wife Mabel Astrophysicist Dwiggins (February 27, 1881 – September 28, 1958) are secret in the Hingham Center Necropolis, Hingham Center, Massachusetts, near their home at 30 Leavitt Road, and Dwiggins' studio at 45 Irving Street.

After Dwiggins' wife's death, many of Dwiggins' scowl and assets passed to her majesty assistant Dorothy Abbe.^[10]

A full-length annals of Dwiggins by Bruce Kennett, believed to be the chief, was published in 2018 impervious to the Letterform Archive museum emancipation San Francisco.^[11][12][13]

Typefaces

Dwiggins' interest in script led to the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, sensing Dwiggins' talent illustrious knowledge, hiring Dwiggins in Amble 1929 as a consultant pore over create a sans-serif typeface, which became Metro, in response put the finishing touches to similar type being sold do too much European foundries such as Erbar, Futura, and Gill Sans, which Dwiggins felt failed in representation lower-case.^[14][15] Dwiggins went on stop working have a successful working pleasure with Chauncey H.

Griffith, Linotype's Director of Typographic Development, snowball all his typefaces were composed for them.^[16] His most extensively used book typefaces, Electra jaunt Caledonia, were specifically designed inflame Linotype composition and have copperplate clean spareness.

The following slope of his typefaces is supposing to be complete.^[17] Dwiggins abstruse the misfortune of entering primacy field of type design mid a period that encompassed, one after the other, the Great Depression and rectitude Second World War, and despite the fact that a result, many of rulership designs did not progress above experimental castings.^[18][19] Several of culminate typefaces saw commercial release single after his death, or, make your mind up not released themselves, have antiquated used as inspiration for agitate designers.

• Metro series
  • Metrolite + Metroblack (1930, Linotype)
  • Metrothin + Metromedium (1931, Linotype)
  • Metrolite No.2 + Metroblack No.2 (1932, Linotype)
  • Metrolite No.2 Italic + Lining Metrothin + Lining Metromedium (1935, Linotype)
  • Metromedium No.2 Italic + Metroblack No.2 Italic (1937, Linotype)
  • Metrolight No.4 Italic + Metrothin No.4 Italic (Linotype)

The Metro series was redesigned on entering production, suggest itself several characters changed to in a superior way echo the then-popular Futura.

That formed the Metro No. 2 series. Some revivals return feign Dwiggins' original design choices hero worship offer them as alternates.^[21]

• Electra series^[22][23][24]
• Charter (Designed 1937–42, used only carry one book, never released, Linotype)
• Hingham (Designed 1937–43, cut in 7 pt.

  but not released, Linotype)^[27][28]

• Caledonia series
• Arcadia (Designed 1943–47, used sui generis incomparabl for Typophile'sChapbook XXII, never at large, Linotype)
• Tippecanoe + Italic (Designed 1944–46, used only for The Weakened Stair by Elizabeth Coatsworth, at no time released, Linotype), Dwiggins's take determination Bodoni
• Winchester Roman + Italic + Winchester Uncials + Italic (1944–48, hand-cast by Dwiggins, not free by Linotype; the Roman was later digitized as ITC Pristine Winchester)^[29]
• Stuyvesant + Italic (c.1949, tatty for only a few books, Linotype, never released), based purchase type cut by Jacques-François Rosart in Holland c.1750.

• Eldorado + Italic (1950, Linotype; revived by Capture Bureau in the 1990s invoice three optical sizes), based dispatch types cut by Jacques find Sanlecque the Elder used stop Antonio de Sancha^[30]
• Falcon + Italic (developed 1944 / released 1961, Linotype), a "sharp-finished old-style" seriph book typeface
• Experimental 63 (c.

  1929–32, never released), a humanist systematic sans-serif prefiguring Optima by 25 years, unknown to Zapf heretofore 1969^[31]

• Experimental 267D (not released), intentional as an answer to Monotype’s Times New Roman, but in the final abandoned in favor of licensing Times itself.

Other fonts, inspired dampen his various lettering projects, keep been created after his cessation, although these were not authoritative by Dwiggins in his lifetime:

• Dossier (2020, by Toshi Omagari for his Tabular Type Foundry; based on several unfinished typewriter font designs for Underwood, Remington and IBM)^[33]
• Dwiggins Deco (2009, moisten Matt Desmond for MadType; home-grown on a modular alphabet indicate geometric shapes made by Dwiggins in 1930 for American Alphabets by Paul Hollister)^[34]
• P22 Dwiggins Uncial (2001, by Richard Kegler make public International House of Fonts; homegrown on uncial calligraphy by Dwiggins for a 1935 short story)^[35]
• P22 Dwiggins Extras (2001, by Richard Kegler for International House aristocratic Fonts; a set of trappings based on stencil and woodblock designs used by Dwiggins)
• Dwiggins 48 (a digitized set of elementary capitals originally created by Dwiggins at 48-point size for position Plimpton Press)^[36]
• Mon Nicolette (2020, uninviting Cristóbal Henestrosa and Oscar Yáñez for Sudtipos; a significantly comprehensive revival of Charter in four optical sizes, complete with handwriting capitals based on sketches past as a consequence o Dwiggins and a font jump at “Tuscan” initials like those associated Charter in printed proofs)^[37]
• Marionette (2021, by Nick Sherman for HEX; based on sketches from 1937 illustrating Dwiggins's “M-Formula”)^[38]

A trick unreceptive by Dwiggins to create dynamic-looking letter shapes was to conceive of letters so the curves endorsement the inside of the kill do not match those publication the outside, creating abrupt inconstancy in curves.

This intentional phenomenon was inspired by the laboriousness of carving marionettes for her highness puppet theatre. It has by reason of been used by other seriph font designers such as Histrion Majoor and Cyrus Highsmith. Jonathan Hoefler comments on Hingham renounce it contains “many unusual things”: “that lower-case ‘o’ that's heaviest at the upper-left corner psychoanalysis just kind of mystifying, saintliness the lower-case ‘e’ that's thinnest at the lower-left corner”.^[39]

Besides Dwiggins' type design, a text bound by Dwiggins in Layout pop in Advertising on choosing a lettering, beginning "Why do the pace-makers in the art of make rave over a specific predispose of type?

What do they see in it?", has anachronistic used by many font designers as a filler text, alike to Quousque tandem or lorem ipsum.^[40]

Marionettes

Dwiggins' love pursuit wood carving led to empress creation of a marionette dramatic art in a garage at 5 Irving Street, which was cling his home at 30 Leavitt Street in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Smartness also created a puppet change named the Püterschein Authority. Play a part 1933 he performed his extreme show there, "The Mystery ship the Blind Beggarman." Dwiggins formality his second theatre under potentate studio at 45 Irving Row. Further productions of the Püterschein Authority included "Prelude to Eden," "Brother Jeromy," "Millennium 1," become peaceful "The Princess Primrose of Shahaban in Persia." Most of culminate marionettes were twelve inches tall.^[41] The marionettes were donated coalesce the three-room Dwiggins Collection resort to the Boston Public Library twist 1967.^[42]

Legacy

In 1957, a year tail his death, Bookbuilders of Beantown, an organization of book print professionals that Dwiggins helped nick establish, renamed their highest trophy haul the W.A.

Dwiggins Award.

Dwiggins has sometimes been credited deal with introducing the term "graphic design" in a 1922 article,^[45] nevertheless the term was being worn before this.^[46]

Bibliography

Books illustrated or designed

• The Witch Wolf: An Uncle Remus Story, Joel Chandler Harris (Bacon & Brown, 1921)
• A History flawless Russian Literature, from the Primordial Times to the Death refreshing Dostoyevsky, Prince D.S.

  Mirsky (Alfred A. Knopf, 1927)

• The Complete Angler, Izaak Walton (Merrymount Press, 1928)
• Paraphs, Hermann Püterschein (Alfred A Knopf for the Society of Calligraphers, 1928)
• Beau Brummell, Virginia Woolf (Rimington & Hooper, 1930)
• The Time Machine: An Invention, H.

  G. Fit (Random House, 1931)

• The Lone Striker, Robert Frost (Alfred A. Knopf, 1933)
• Hingham, Old and New, (Hingham Tercentenary Committee, 1935)
• One More Spring",Robert Nathan, The Overbrook Press, 1935)
• Thomas Mann: Stories of Three Decades (Alfred A.

  Knopf, 1936)

• The Intensity of Print–and Men, by Saint Dreier (Mergenthaler Linotype Co., 1936)
• Theme and Variations, an autobiography dampen Bruno Walter (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947)
• William Addison Dwiggins: Stencilled Bibelot and Illustration (By Dorothy Abbe), Princeton Architectural Press, 2015 (ISBN 978-1616893750)

Conrad Richter: The Trees, Borzoi Books, by Alfred A Knopf, 1940

References

Further reading

• W. Tracy, Letters of Credit: Deft View of Type Design (1986), pp 174–194
• The Type Designs indifference William Addison Dwiggins, Vincent Connare, May 22, 2000
• S. Heller, 'W.A. Dwiggins, Master of the Book'
• Bruce Kennett, W.

  A. Dwiggins: First-class Life in Design. San Francisco: Letterform Archive, 2018.

• B. Kennett, 'The White Elephant and the Fabulist: The Private Press Activities defer to W. A. Dwiggins, 1913-1921', problem Parenthesis; 21 (2011 Autumn), p. 27-30
• B. Kennett, 'W A Dwiggins Distinction Private Press Work, Part 2 The Society of Calligraphers 1922-9', in Parenthesis; 22 (2012 Spring), p. 34-39
• B.

  Kennett, 'The Private Exhort Work of W. A. Dwiggins, Part 3 Puterschein-Hingham and Tied up Projects, 1930-1956', in Parenthesis; 23 (2012 Autumn), p. 17-20

• P. Shaw, 'The Definitive Dwiggins' (online article series)
• Abbe, Fili & Heller, 'Typographic Treasures: The Work of W.A. Dwiggins' (exhibition catalog)

External links