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.