A b r i e f and

T y p o g r a p h i c

excurs ion into

the life and work of W. A. Dwiggins

by G. M. W a l l a c e.

b o o k d e s i g n · p o r t l a n d 2 0 1 5

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illiam Addison Dwiggins was nothing if not prodi-gious. As a typographer, book designer, calligra-pher, stencil artist, printer,

painter, puppeteer, writer of essays, criticisms, fiction, and plays, and designer of advertise-ments, furniture, costumes, upholstery, and marionettes, his is a design career of aston-ishing output (Blumenthal 88–89; Fabian).

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orn in 1880 in Martinsville, Ohio, Dwiggins had ink in his blood: according to family leg-end, his maternal grandfather traveled across Ohio with a print-

ing press (Blumenthal 88). At 19, Dwiggins moved to Chicago to learn art and design, studying at the Frank Holme school under legendary type designer Frederic W. Goudy, who spurred Dwiggins’ interest in printing (Fabian). After graduation and some peregri-nations around the eastern states, Dwiggins and his new wife, Mabel, settled in Hingham, Massachusetts in 1904; it would be their per-manent home and, for much of Dwiggins’ later career, his studio workspace (DAPA 111).

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he next twenty years would be very busy for Dwiggins. He took commissions from numerous advertising agencies, a field to which he was initially drawn

because of his hand-lettering abilities; sold various designed & printed knickknacks, such as greeting cards; served as the inter-im director of Harvard University Press from 1917–1918; and, in 1919, founded the Soci-ety of Calligraphers in Boston, a fictional organization (which is still frequently mis-taken to have been a real organization) to which he jokingly appointed president his fictional alter ego and sometime-nom de plume, Dr. Hermann Püterschein (DAPA 111; Devroye; Fabian; Shaw 1984: 35).                  

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hen he wasn’t busy work-ing on projects for mon-ey, Dwiggins was busy working on projects for self-enrichment and en-

tertainment. For the Dwigginses’ home in Hingham, he designed “furniture, car-pets, lampshades, fireplace screens, and a weathervane that reported wind direc-tion at a remote location inside the house”; he also filled the dining room and living room walls with expansive murals depicting scenes from his favorite stories (Kennett 30).

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ne of Dwiggins’ more gleeful and portentous efforts began in 1913 with his like-minded cous-in, Laurence B. Siegfried. Sieg-fried was a printer himself and,

later, editor of the journal American Printer and professor of journalism at Syracuse Univer-sity. Using Dwiggins’ personal hand-press—a small behemoth (complete with 150 pounds of Caslon 471 type) that he dubbed The White Elephant—and Siegfried’s access to presses at Yale University, the duo produced three issues of The Fabulist, a literary magazine, between 1915 and 1921. (DAPA 111; Kennett 28–29). While ostensibly intended to “[divert them-selves] from their regular work” and offer an expressive outlet for their “peculiar but potent individualities,” The Fabulist was a showcase of Dwiggins’ innovative stencil illustrations and impressive hand-lettering skills (Kennett 28).    

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n 1919, Dwiggins and Siegfried pub-lished An Investigation into the Physi-cal Properties of Books, Dwiggins’ crit-ical satire on publishing and written in his characteristic style of “using hu-

mor to drive home points that he wished to make about serious topics” (Kennett 27; Shaw 2006: 43). The impact of An In-vestigation was immense, sparking reforms across the entire US book production sys-tem, and greatly raised Dwiggins’ stature among printers and publishers (Fabian).

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onsiderable misfortune struck Dwiggins in 1922, when he was diagnosed with diabetes, which was difficult to control at the time. Seemingly undeterred,

Dwiggins vowed to escape “the universal twelve-year-old mind of the purchasing pub-lic” that advertising’s rigid structure imposed upon his design work (DAPA 113; Shaw 1984: 28). Dwiggins ramped up his creative and writ-ten output, began making his famous mario-nettes as a means of coping with diabetes, and published another influential tract, “Advertis-ing Uses Seduction to Exploit the Weakness-es of Mankind,” that further elevated his stat-ure in publishing (Johnston; Shaw 1984: 28).

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artially through public attention from this essay, and also with the help of Frederic G. Melcher, edi-tor of Publishers’ Weekly and R. R. Bowker & Co. affiliate, and Ches-

ter Lane of the Harvard University Press, Dwiggins met Alfred A. Knopf in 1923, and the two hit it off marvelously (Blumenthal 92; Shaw 1984: 30). Dwiggins’ wonderous-ly prolific book-design career began soon thereafter, and after he became Knopf’s principal designer in 1928, he committed the majority of his time to creating books, designing a total of 280 books between 1928 until his death on Christmas Day in 1956 (Blumenthal 92; Fabian; Shaw 1984: 30).            

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lthough Dwiggins’ tremendous body of work is probably how he’s remembered best, anoth-er of his important but less-er-known contributions to book

design was his inclusion of the colophon, with its details about a book’s typesetting, into Knopf books. (Powers; Shaw 1984: 30) The colophon was primarily a component of private-press books, and though some audi-ences initially found it pretentious and affect-ed, its use became an industry standard, and today, every Knopf hardcover still includes a colophon with an altered form of Dwig-gins’ particular title: “A Note on the Type in Which this Book is Set” (Shaw 1984: 30–31).  

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ype was to become the foremost interest in Dwiggins’ work. Be-cause he wanted to be remem-bered as a typographer—and be-cause acquiring the books

featuring his original essays on design proved too time-consuming, thus foiling my intended direction—the remainder of this es-say will focus on one of Dwiggins’ highlight-ed contributions to typography: the Metro type family (ADC Global; Clifford 60).

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otwithstanding the fact that much of Dwiggins’ career in advertising involved lettering, it wasn’t until his tenure with Knopf that he, at age 48, first

attempted to design a typeface (Fabian). Per-haps Dwiggins had always intended to create a typeface, but the story behind his first such work, Metro, implies he did so almost on a lark.   

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uring the mid-1920s, typog-raphy was changing. Thanks to the influence of Bauhaus- affiliated designers like Jan Tschichold, László Moho-

ly-Nagy, and Herbert Bayer, sans-serif de-signs caught on in Europe and eventually spread to North America, with R. Hunter Middleton producing the first new sans ser-if in the United States—Stellar—in 1929 (Lawson 324–325; Novin; Stock-Allen).

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owever, many designers with traditionalist leanings, includ-ing Dwiggins and printer/his-torian of typography Daniel Berkeley Updike, scoffed at the

idea of adopting sans serifs—and these scoffs were not small, either (Lawson 330). Updike made no mention of sans serifs in his land-mark 1922 type primer, Printing Types, and only relented some fifteen years later when he stated that Futura and Gill Sans were ac-ceptable “if sans serif fonts must be had”; like-wise Dwiggins, writing in his own influential tome, 1928’s design manual Layout in Adver-tising, intentionally excluded sans serifs from his survey, save Gothic—a newspaper main-stay—which he indicated was not very legi-ble, lacked good capitals, and simply “[had] no grace” (Lawson 330; Shaw 2006: 37).

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fter reading Layout and meeting with Siegfried, Harry L. Gage, the assistant director of Lino-type typography at Mergenthal-er Linotype, wrote to Dwiggins

inquiring if the designer would like to create and “illustrate” a “good [sans serif] design” for Linotype (Blumenthal 92). Dwiggins accept-ed Gage’s offer, beginning work on the design immediately, and after meeting with Dwig-gins at his home in Hingham, Gage signed an exclusive contract with Dwiggins for $2,900 per year—the equivalent of over $39,000 in 2014 dollars—months before Dwiggins even completed his sans serif (Consumer Price Index; Lawson 330; Shaw 2006: 38).

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age and Mergenthaler wanted a type “in the Futura mode,” and when Dwiggins delivered his first typeface, Metroblack, in early 1931, it was met admira-

tion but also consternation (Lawson 332). As Paul Shaw, prominent Dwiggins scholar, ex-plains it, Metroblack’s “originality lay in the retention of old-style forms of letters such as a, e and g. This was also its flaw” (Shaw 2006: 44). Despite this failure, Dwiggins remained undaunted, still hoping to infuse his sans serif with a humanist structure, and at the behest of Mergenthaler, he set about revising Metro-black. (Lawson 332; Shaw 2006: 44). After completing new characters for A, G, J, M, N, V, W, a, e, g, v, and w, Dwiggins considered the new typeface finished, and after Mergen-thaler launched it in 1931 under a new name, Metroblack no. 2, the typeface became a suc-cess (Shaw 2006: 44). Though this successful iteration of Metro “arrived too late to supplant Futura or Gill Sans”—and though Mergen-thaler eventually replaced Metro with Spar-tan, a “Futura look-alike”—the Metro family prospered in the newspaper industry, where it is still used today (Lawson 332; Shaw 1984: 38).

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ven though Dwiggins declared Metroblack’s initial incarnation a “hellish [font] when you really stop to look at it,” his work on the Met-ro family is notable for its consis-

tency and overall harmony (Connare; Shaw 1984: 38). As Vincent Connare has noted, “while typefaces such as [Univers and Hel-vetica] suffer from overuse and have a Ger-manic or Swiss geometric structure, Met-ro has a warm and subtle craft quality that is closer to the human hand” (Connare).

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n designing his first type, and in a form (sans serif) with which he ostensibly dis-agreed, Dwiggins strove to bring his cal-ligraphic touch to Metro’s design, later warning that “[if] you don’t get your type

warm it will just be smooth, commonplace, third-rate piece of good machine technique—no use setting down warm human ideas—just a box full of rivets” (Carter 67; Connare). True to form, Metro is notable for its peculiar fusion of geometric and calligraphic touches: uniquely angular and peaked features found in the capitals; pen-based elements, such as the tapering off of the small f ’s ascender; and the not-quite-mechanical, not-quite-painted swash of the capital Q (Connare).

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etro helped Dwiggins get his typographer’s sea-legs, and it also gave him an op-portunity to begin adapting one of his previous skills—

stencils—to typography (Shaw 2006: 43).

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igilantly hand-drawing his ini-tial designs at large sizes, Dwig-gins would give his complet-ed drafts to an assistant who would draw them at enormous

sizes—up to sixty-four times twelve-point size—and, taking what worked from these drafts, Dwiggins cut stencils in celluloid for each letter at twenty-four-point size (Dwiggins 2). After that, his assistant used the stencils with a projector to enlarge the images while Dwiggins took notes, and then Dwiggins created larger stencils, this time in sixty-four-point size using cardboard (Dwiggins 3–4).

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ccording to Dwiggins, by cre-ating these differing sets of enlargements—the enlarged drawings and the cardboard stencils—and then compar-

ing them to the original, smaller-sized typeface drafts, “you can see what you are doing; you can thicken or thin your stems or modify curves for another trial if need-ed, or go ahead with the rest of the letters on the original scheme” (Dwiggins 4).

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inally, after these processes were complete, Dwiggins would move onto the next stage and begin draft-ing designs closer to the typeface’s intended final form (Dwiggins 5).

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lthough he didn’t fully uti-lize this method until design-ing his Falcon typeface in the 1940s, Dwiggins’ stencil and enlargement techniques in-

formed the design processes of his two sub-sequent and most successful typefaces, Elec-tra (1935) and Caledonia (1939) (Connare).  

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A Note on the Type

The body text of this booklet is set in Electra LT Std, an opentype edition of W. A. Dwiggins’ origi-nal 1935 typeface adapted for Adobe programs. The front matter, back matter, and page numbers are set in New Caledonia LT Std, released by Linotype in the late 1980s as an updated edition of Dwiggins’ 1939 font, Caledonia—one of the most widely used book typefaces of all time (Adobe). All drop caps are set in DwigginsForty Eight, a digitization of Dwiggins’ initials produced through Plimpton Press in the 1930s, produced by David Rakowski and re-leased in 1999. Dwiggins passed away on Christ-mas Day, and I’ve colored the first and last pairs of drop caps red and green to commemorate this date.

—GMW

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Works Cited

ADC Global. “W. A. Dwiggins.” 1979; 2015. Retrieved from adcglobal.org/hall-of-fame/w-a-dwiggins/.

Adobe. “New Caledonia™ Std Regular.” 2015. Retrieved from store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/html/index.cfm?store=OLS-US &event=displayFont&code=CDOQ10005000.

Blumenthal, Joseph. The Printed Book in America. Boston: D.R. Godine, 1977.

Clifford, John. Graphic Icons: Visionaries Who Shaped Modern Graphic Design. Berkeley: Peachpit Press, 2014.

Consumer Price Index. “1929 dollars in 2014 dollars.” Retrieved from in2013dollars.com/ 1929-dollars-to-2014-dollars.

DAPA and Dorothy Abbe. “Concerning Dwiggins: DAPA Interview with Dorothy Abbe.” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 7, Illustrated Book Theme Issue (Winter 1988): 110–129.

Devroye, Luc. “William Addison Dwiggins.” Mar. 1, 2015. Retrieved from luc.devroye.org/ fonts-26309.html.

Dwiggins, W. A. “WAD to RR: a letter about type design.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, Dept. of Printing and Graphic Arts, 1940. Retrieved from archive.org/details/ WADtoRR1940.

Fabian, Nicholas. “Designer Extraordinaire: William Addison Dwiggins.” Oct. 19, 2000. Retrieved from web.archive.org/ web/20001012002613/web.idirect.com/~nfhome/dwiggins.htm.

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Johnston, Alastair. “Father of Graphic Design: Dwiggins in Living Color.” Booktryst (blog). Aug. 21, 2012. Retrieved from booktryst.com/2012/08/digging-dwiggins-in-technicolor.html.

Kennett, Bruce. “The Private Press Activities of William Addison Dwiggins Part 1.” Parenthesis 21 (Autumn 2011): p. 27–30. Retrieved from fpba.com/parenthesis/select-articles/ p21_private_press_activities_of_dwiggins.html.

Lawson, Alexander. Anatomy of a Typeface. Boston: Godine, 1990.

Novin, Guity. “Chapter 54: A History of Typeface.” A History of Graphic Design (blog). 2014. Retrieved from guity-novin. blogspot.com/2012/03/history-of-type-face.html.

Powers, Will. “I had never seen this done before. Why was it done? Colophons” (Msg 9). Jul. 21, 2009. Message posted to http://typophile.com/node/60136.

Shaw, Paul. “Tradition and Innovation: The Design Work of William Addison Dwiggins.” Design Issues 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1984): 26–41.

———. “W.A. Dwiggins: Jack of all Trades, master of more than one.” Linotype Matrix 4, no. 2 (2006): 36–45. Retrieved from issuu.com/linotype/docs/matrix_4.2.

Stock-Allen, Nancy. “Typography at the Bauhaus.” 2011. Retrieved from designhistory.org/Avant_Garde_pages/ BauhausType.html.

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Image Sources

Front: Stencil calligraphy by Dwiggins. (Source: DAPA.)

Page 2: Portrait of W. A. Dwiggins by Dorothy Abbe, 1954. (Source: letterformarchive.org/dwiggins/.)

Page 3: A photo of the Dwiggins residence in Hingham, MA; Dwiggin’s studio was on the second floor. (Source: DAPA.)

Page 4: Dwiggins’ hand-lettered return address for the Society of Calligraphers. (Source: letterformarchive.org/dwiggins/.)

Page 5: Excerpt from linocut by Dwiggins, 1921. (Source: flickr. com/photos/ulfjacobsen/8360430111/in/pool-wadwiggins/.)

Page 6 (l): The seal from Dwiggins’ White Elephant press; its motto reads “What shall I make?” (Source: Kennett.)

Page 6 (r): Header from The Fabulist 3, 1921. (Source: Kennett.)

Page 7: A graph designed by Dwiggins from An Investigation into the Physical Properties of Books, 1917. (Source: Kennett.)

Page 8: Several of the marionettes designed by Dwiggins. (Source: letterformarchive.org/dwiggins/.)

Page 9: Dwiggins’ title page for H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Random House in 1931. (Source: www.athenna.com.)

Page 10: Sample of Dwiggins-style endnote on type. (Source: livingbetween wednesdays.com/?p=4215.)

Page 11: Metroblack and Metrolite. (Source: Shaw 1984).

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Page 12: One of Dwiggins’ hand-lettered advertisements, 1928. (Source: letterformarchive.org/dwiggins/.)

Page 13: The Bauhaus, Germany. (Source: ronenbekerman.com/ bauhaus-at-dessau-3d-visualiztion-by-bertrand-benoit/.)

Page 14: Dwiggins stencil illustration from Robert Nathan’s One More Spring, Overbrook Press, 1935. (Source: graphicarts. princeton.edu/2013/08/23/one-more-spring/.)

Page 15: Dwiggins’ Layout in Advertising, 1928. (Source: DAPA.)

Page 17: Dwiggins’ Metroblack typeface in a poster by Priscilla Vozella, 2014. (Source: luc.devroye.org/fonts-26309.html.)

Page 18: Metroblack. (Source: fontpalace.com.)

Page 19: Dwiggins stencil illustration from The Saturday Evening Post, 1927. (Source: letterformarchive.org/dwiggins/.)

Page 20: Dwiggins in his studio, late 1930s. (Source: Shaw 2006.)

Page 21: Celluloid stencils from one of Dwiggins’ experimental typefaces. (Source: flickr.com/photos/kupfers/7977556839/.)

Page 22: Design for lettertype stencil. (Source: Dwiggins.)

Page 23: Alphabet for experimental roman typeface. (Source: luc. devroye.org/fonts-26309.html.)

Page 24: Proof sheet of Dwiggins capitals from Plimpton Press, circa 1936. (Source: letterformarchive.org/dwiggins/.)