William Addison Dwiggins

He attained prominence as an illustrator and commercial artist, and he brought to the designing of type and books some of the boldness that he displayed in his advertising work.

With his colleague Frederic Goudy, he moved east to Hingham, Massachusetts, where he spent the rest of his life.

He gained recognition as a lettering artist and wrote much on the graphic arts, notably essays collected in MSS by WAD (1949), and his Layout in Advertising (1928; rev.

My back is turned on the more banal kind of advertising...I will produce art on paper and wood after my own heart with no heed to any market.

He said he welcomed the chance to "do something besides waste-basket stuff" which would be "promptly thrown away" and chose the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

[10] A full-length biography of Dwiggins by Bruce Kennett, believed to be the first, was published in 2018 by the Letterform Archive museum of San Francisco.

[14][15] Dwiggins went on to have a successful working relationship with Chauncey H. Griffith, Linotype's Director of Typographic Development, and all his typefaces were created for them.

[16] His most widely used book typefaces, Electra and Caledonia, were specifically designed for Linotype composition and have a clean spareness.

Further productions of the Püterschein Authority included "Prelude to Eden," "Brother Jeromy," "Millennium 1," and "The Princess Primrose of Shahaban in Persia."

[42] 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.

Published in 1919, Dwiggins used this parody graph to express his opinion of standards in printing.
Dwiggins' Metrolite and Metroblack fonts, geometric designs of the style popular in the 1930s. Shown in a Linotype specimen in the revised form that saw commercial release, with the 'M', 'a' and other characters revised to resemble the highly successful Futura. [ 20 ]
The digital Eldorado by Font Bureau , created in the early 1990s after the typeface had lapsed into obscurity without a phototype release. FB Eldorado was one of the first commercial digital fonts to feature optical sizes (shown is the Text cut).
A set of initials designed by Dwiggins for the Plimpton Press. [ 32 ]
Dwiggins' "How is one to assess" text used in a Linotype specimen of Caslon .
A page decoration created by Dwiggins in 1914.
A FontShop specimen image of Cyrus Highsmith 's Quiosco typeface. It was inspired by Dwiggins' 'M-formula' practice in designing small-size typefaces of creating an obvious difference between the curve shapes on the outside and inside of the letterforms. [ 43 ] [ 44 ]