The Great Gargantua and Pantagruel^367
W. A. DwigginsAn admirer said of William
Addison Dwiggins ( 1880 –
1956 ): “There are few
American designers whose
work can be revisited after
decades with more pleasure
and instruction.” Dwiggins
was a renaissance man:
typographer, type designer,
illustrator, author, puppeteer,
marionette designer, book
jacket and book designer. He
was the missing link between
the aesthetic movement and
commercial art, an auteur in
that he developed an
unmistakably distinctive graphic style that informed the practice of his
epoch, from the 1920 s to the 1950 s. To give further buoyancy to his
reputation, on August 29, 1922, in an article in the Boston Evening
Transcript,Dwiggins was the first to use the term graphic designto describe
his broad design practice.
Dwiggins’s passion for design pervaded everything he touched
(and wrote). His work was an extension of his self. “One stood quietly apart
waiting for him to look up,” recalled Dorothy Abbe, his long-time
colleague, about his intensity, passion, and humanity. “Presently he swung
from his stool. With a final glance at the piece that absorbed him, he
reached for tobacco and, filling his pipe, slowly turned toward you, smiling
his welcome. This was ever his way—the smile, the slow unhurried steps,
emphasized by the simplicity of his dress, always in white. Not only did he
move slowly, but he worked slowly in the sense that the first effort was
usually discarded, to be written, or drawn, or carved, again and again. And
yet in this quiet, patient manner he brought into being more than most
people even dream of.”
Among the countless projects completed during his long career,
the shelf backs (or spines), title pages, and illuminations for a five-volume
boxed set of Rabelais’s The Great Gargantua and Pantagruel( 1936 ) reveals