Oh, but I am envious of Dwiggins! The work he did! The fun he had!
The serious reader will forgive the exclamation points, I hope. Of all the designers of printed matter whom I admire—and they are legion—William Addison Dwiggins outstrips them all for sheer inventiveness and joie de vivre. Not for W.A.D. the pious formality of Daniel Berkeley Updike or the delicate historicism of Bruce Rogers, nor the icy perfection of the Swiss modernists. For “Dwig” the page was a playground where he made type, illustration, color, even the paper itself his very serious toys.
If the word “creative” has, in recent decades, picked up a disagreeable tang—an odor of artiness, temperamentalism, and unreliability—Dwiggins’s career embodies the word in its best possible sense. Whether he was revising proofs of a new typeface, spinning a fresh tale for his Athalinthia series, or carving a marionette for his theater in Hingham, Dwiggins informed everything he attempted with nuance, intuition, and humor, while always adhering to the highest professional and aesthetic standards. He corresponded, worked, and socialized with the leading lights of the flourishing, tight-knit world of printing and book design during the first half of the twentieth century, all of whom admired his work and sought out his company.
Dwiggins’s career embodies the word “creative” in its best possible sense.
A native of Ohio, Dwiggins studied art at a short-lived Chicago school where he had the good fortune to be taught by the likes of
