by Nicholas Fabian

William Addison Dwiggins was born in 1880 in Martinsville, Ohio. In his formative years he developed a deep interest in art, and at age 19 moved to Chicago to further his education. There he attended Holme's School of Illustration and studied illustration under the Saturday Evening Post's Leyendecker brothers and lettering and typography with Frederic W. Goudy who was also teaching at the school. (Frank Holme, who died in 1904, at the age of 36, was a newspaper artist in Chicago who ran the school as a side-line. Another famous graduate of the school was Oswald Cooper, who later designed 'Cooper Black'.)

In Ohio, Dwiggins worked with little success at job printing and later followed Goudy to Hingham, Massachusetts. After Goudy's departure to New York, Dwiggins settled in Hingham for the rest of his life, and also maintained a design studio in Boston for a number of years. In 1910 he bought a hand press and began the White Elephant Press. Nine year later, he produced a pamphlet in which he gave a devastating critique on the physical quality of American books. The influence of "Investigation into the Physical Properties of Books" by Dwiggins was immense and it created the spark to reform the entire book production system in the United States.

Dwiggins spent the early part of his career designing commercial advertisements, but preferred book design to all other work and during his lifetime produced over 300 book designs for the publisher, Alfred Knops. One of Dwiggins' best known book design was H.G. Wells', The Time Machine, produced in 1931 for Random House publishing.

Text sample set in "Caledonia Bold", designed by William Addison Dwiggins.

In 1928, Dwiggins produced a manual titled, "Layout in Advertising" and in the book some of his criticisms of current typography were brought to the attention of Harry L. Gage, president of the Linotype Company. Dwiggins was invited for a meeting with Gage, and from such a chance meeting, began an association with the Mergenthaler Linotype Company that lasted for 27 years, until his death on Christmas Day, 1956. It is astonishing to to find that Dwiggins designed his first typeface, Metro, at the age of 49!

Dwiggins was a book designer, illustrator, type designer, calligrapher, writer, mural painter, costume designer, sculptor, playwright, and marionettes theatre connoisseur, who occasionally gave live performances under the name of Dr. Hermann Puterschein. Furthermore, with characteristic flair he also restyled Harper's Magazine. William Addison Dwiggins' best type designs succesfully combined creative freedom with superb discipline.

Costume design sketches for the theatre by William Addison Dwiggins.
(Images are courtesy of Barbara Culhane.)

The typefaces designed by Dwiggins are:

Metro (1929-30), Electra (1935), Caledonia (1939), Eldorado (1953). Stuyvesant, Winchester, Acadia, Tippecanoe, Hingham and Falcon were experimental fonts. Falcon was issued by Linotype in 1961, posthumously, five years after his death. All Dwiggins' fonts were designed for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company.

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