rendered by hand; given the extant physical evidence, many were done
without a single mistake (when mistakes did occur, he simply redrew them
rather than touching up the errors). Dwiggins’s calligraphic display letters, a
marriage of classical typefaces and invented scripts, set the standard for
Knopf ’s books and influenced many other publishers, who employed Dwig
or one of his many imitators.
Book jackets, however, fell into the category of advertising that
Dwiggins initially wanted to avoid. Yet, due to his special relationship
with Mr. Knopf, when asked, he did them. Nevertheless, his method was
a form of denial. He refused to pictorially illustrate most covers, as was
the common practice, but rather applied Dwigginsian ornament and
calligraphic lettering. Hence, there was a great formal similarity between all
his jackets. The image area of his most common jacket format was cut in
half, with the title on top and a subtitle or other type below. Sometimes he
used an excessive amount of ornamentation, but only with his self-authored
books did he ever use a drawing. A typical approach—found in his jacket
for Willa Cather’sLost Lady,which includes a hand-lettered title and
byline and characteristic Dwigginsian ornament printed in pink, green, and
brown—is something like a souped-up title page. Compared to the
designers of many of the lettered jackets of his day, Dwiggins had a unique
flair, wedding balance and harmony with quirkiness. The jackets rarely
evoked the plot or theme of the book but were essentially decoration—a
“dust wrapper” in the purest sense of the word. One of his most alluring
jackets—for James M. Cain’s Serenade( 1937 ), the design of which is a
bouquet of abstracted flora—is akin more to beautiful wrapping paper than
an advertisement for the book.
Given the choice, Dwiggins preferred using his hands to make
things; hand lettering was more satisfying than type design. He did not
begin to design complete type alphabets until 1929 , when, at the urging of
C. H. Griffith, marketing director for the Mergenthaler Linotype
Corporation, he designed his first typeface for continued reading. He did
not attempt to replicate his calligraphy. In fact, the initial undertaking (the
first of eighteen typefaces), had no relationship whatsoever to his lettering.
Metro Black was a uniform sans serif letter that Dwiggins designed
because he saw a need for a strong gothic that did more for display
advertising than Futura and other European gothics. Ironically, Dwig never
used this typeface on any book jacket.
“There are few American designers whose work can be revisited
after decades with more pleasure and instruction,” an admirer wrote about
Dwiggins a decade after his death. When viewing examples of his printed
work or the original drawings that surface at exhibitions, much of Dwig’s
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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