Decorative Book Jackets^207
W. A. DwigginsIn the early 1920 s, when William Addison Dwiggins ( 1880 – 1956 ) was in his
forties—an age by which many of his contemporaries had already done
their best work and were ossified in their ways—he was at the peak of his
form and open to all possibilities. He did not subscribe to avant-garde
theory or any other theory that held sway in the 1920 s and 1930 s. He was
never dogmatic regarding the ideological rightness of form. On one
occasion he wrote disparagingly about the typographic antics of those
modern American designers he referred to as the Bauhaus boys, while on
another he attacked the rigidity of narrow-minded traditionalists.
Dwiggins, WAD, Dwig, or Bill—take your pick—grew up in
Cambridge, Ohio, and at nineteen studied lettering with Frederic Goudy
at the Frank Holme School of Illustration in Chicago, Illinois. He was
weaned on the ideals of the aesthetic movement, of which proponents
imitated fine printing of the past. In 1912 Dwiggins and T. M. Cleland were
singled out by the preeminent posterist and typographer Will Bradley for
work that had brought taste and skill back into a field that had “sunk to the
lowest possible depths before their appearance.”