Background

William Addison Dwiggins was born on June 19, 1880, in Martinsville, Ohio. He was the son of Moses Frazer Dwiggins, a physician, and Eva Siegfried.

Education

Dwiggins attended school in Richmond, Indiana, and Zanesville, Ohio, and in 1899 graduated from high school in Cambridge, Ohio.  He then entered the Frank Holme School of Illustration in Chicago, where he studied lettering with Frederic W. Goudy and illustration with Frank X. Leyendecker and Joseph C. Leyendecker, illustrators for the Saturday Evening Post.

Career

Dwiggins had become an accomplished draftsman and began free-lancing in Chicago.  In 1902 he collaborated with Goudy on the design of In a Balcony for the Blue Sky Press.  The following year Dwiggins returned to Cambridge to establish the Guernsey Shop, a small press producing illustrated books.  

Dwiggins subsequently moved to Hingham, Massachusetts, where Goudy had relocated his Village Press.  After Goudy moved the press to New York City, Dwiggins stayed on in Hingham, commuting to his Boston workshop and eking out a living by doing "potboilers" such as labels for cans and drawings of furniture for use in newspaper advertisements.  He also designed motto cards and calendars for the publisher Alfred Bartlett.  At a meeting of the Society of Printers in Boston, Dwiggins met Daniel Berkeley Updike, who obtained a grant for him to go to Europe in 1908; it was Dwiggins' only trip abroad.

Although Dwiggins was becoming successful in advertising and was amassing an impressive list of clients, his chief interest was bookmaking.  In 1910 he bought a hand press and produced occasional bulletins under the imprint of The White Elephant Press.  With his cousin Laurance Siegfried, and operating under the device of "The-dam Peterschein's Sons, " Dwiggins published the first of three issues of The Fabulist, a seriocomic magazine, in the fall of 1915.  The name originated in a rare moment of irritation, when Siegfried overheard him say, "I can't make the damn pewter shine. " An entire imaginary family soon emerged: the learned, pedantic Dr. Herman Peterschein; his brother Jacob; and three sisters, Elsa, Henrietta, and Hedwig.  Later, a "Mwano Masassi" appeared in The Fabulist, the last issue of which appeared in the fall of 1921.  During this period Dwiggins founded the imaginary Society of Calligraphers.  Under the guise of being part of a special committee established by the "society, " he and Siegfried published a satiric, tongue-in-cheek attack on existing standards of book production. Entitled Extracts From an Investigation Into the Physical Properties of Books (1919), the pamphlet concluded that "all books of the present day are badly made. " The work was widely circulated, and its impact was great.

In 1923, having learned that he had diabetes (then potentially fatal), Dwiggins decided to leave the advertising field. Chester Lane, director of the Harvard University Press, encouraged him to try to get more work from book publishers and gave him letters of introduction to several New York firms.  During the next five years he worked on twelve books for eight publishers.  Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy (1926) was his first book for Alfred A. Knopf, the house for which he was consulting designer for almost thirty years.  By 1930 Dwiggins was designing bindings and wrappers for Knopf and, by 1936, entire books.  He helped to establish the influential Knopf style and to make books produced by the company among the most physically attractive of the time.  His designs were initially made with small, inked, wooden blocks.  Finding this limiting, he devised a stencil technique, cutting and combining celluloid elements and stenciling them with brush and india ink, or with watercolors.  Bold and unusual color combinations were characteristic of his work, and his stencil designs went well with the book type.  His bindings for Knopf, usually of cloth stamped in gold or color on the back and often blind on the cover, had hand-lettered spines.  In Layout in Advertising (1928), which became a classic in the field, Dwiggins evaluated the legibility of certain typefaces and decried the lack of good design in advertising.  

In response Chauncey H. Griffith of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company asked Dwiggins to design new typefaces, and in the spring of 1929 he began a twenty-seven-year association with the company.  Using the stencil method, Dwiggins designed eleven typefaces, in addition to five experimental faces and three Greek fonts.  

In addition to Marionette in Motion (1939), in which he explained the construction of his marionettes, Dwiggins published three marionette plays.  In 1937, Philip Hofer, of the Houghton Library at Harvard, put together the second show of Dwiggins' work, for the American Institute of Graphic Arts.  In 1947, Dwiggins set up a press in his Hingham studio with Dorothy Abbe, a typographical designer, who became his working partner.  The following year the Boston Book Builders presented an exhibit of his work at the Boston Public Library.

William died on December 25, 1956, in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Achievements

• In 1929 the American Institute of Graphic Arts honored Dwiggins with its gold medal for his accomplishmentsand held a comprehensive exhibition of his work in New York City. In 1957, a year after his death, Bookbuilders of Boston, an organization of book publishing professionals that Dwiggins helped to establish, renamed their highest award the W. A. Dwiggins Award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • WAD to RRA Letter about Designing Type HARDCOVER

    (Lang:- English, Pages 16, It is the reproduction of the o...)

  • Twenty-Two Printers' Marks And Seals

    (Designed Or Redrawn By W. A. Dwiggins.)

  • FIVE HUNDRED YEARS, A TIME-PROBLEM, AND ITS SOLUTION.

    (Limited to 50 copies. A story by Dwiggins concerning two ...)

  • MSS By WAD: Being A Collection Of The Writings Of Dwiggins On Various Subjects Some Critical, Some Philosophical, Some Whimsical

Views

Dwiggins' belief in a "balanced life" was reflected in the diversity of his interests, which included writing plays; designing kites and weathervanes; making woodcuts, watercolors, and murals; fashioning his own tools; and whittling marionettes.  

Quotations: "I will produce art on paper and wood after my own heart with no heed to any market. " 

Personality

Described by his associates as gentle, humorous, and urbane, Dwiggins was devoid of professional jealousy and always willing to share his knowledge.  His clarity and ironic wit were reflected in his conversation and literary style.  

Quotes from others about the person

• Summing up Entitled Extracts From an Investigation Into the Physical Properties of Books (1919) influence, Paul M. Hollister wrote: "publishers either sent for Dwiggins, or set their designers to imitating him or . .. branched out along the lines of his principles.  Take any fifty 'trade books' of 1937 and you will see how often today's books echo his innovations. " 

Connections

On September 8, 1904, Dwiggins married Mabel Hoyle; they had no children.  

Father:

Moses Frazer Dwiggins

Mother:

Eva Siegfried

Wife:

Mabel Hoyle

colleague:

Frederic Goudy

colleague:

Dorothy Abbe

References

• ALFRED A. KNOPF WILL DISCUSS THE FIFTY BOOKS OF THE YEAR AND WILL COMM ENT ON THE WORK OF W.A. DWIGGINS AT A MEETING OF THE SOCIETY OF PRINTERS.
• Dwiggins A Characterization