 For those who don't know Dwingens, W.A. Dwingens was a graphic designer, he was a type designer, he was a book designer, he was an advertising designer. In his spare time, he made marionettes. He wrote about things in his profession, he wrote plays and other non-design stories. And so to many people, he's fascinating because of these different activities. He was born in 1880 in Martinsville, Ohio and within a few months his father moved the family to Richmond, Indiana where they lived for 10 years. His father died of pneumonia during the big flu epidemic of 1889, probably not as well known as one of 1918, though his father had adult onset diabetes which must have hastened his death. So that his mother and he moved about for a couple of years before they settled in Cambridge, Ohio in the mid 1890s and then in 1899 he went to art school in Chicago. School he went to was the Frank Holmes School. Now before we get there what you're seeing is the earliest known lettering by Dwingens. Somewhere in the mid 1880s, Willie Dwingens his book and I like all the curly numbers and at the above you can see his mother's handwriting, that's not his handwriting at the top. The title of the talk that I gave came from my article he wrote in 1919 about Roman letter forms and I thought it was an interesting phrase so I stuck it out of my title. So the Frank Holmes School in Chicago it was run by Frank Holmes, a newspaper artist and his wife and it was just a couple rooms on a building on Michigan Avenue. It was a commercial art school home was trying to teach people how to be newspaper illustrators but also commercial artists and it was an amazing amazing place. It didn't last very long. It was found in 1898 basically closed down in 1904 because Holmes got tuberculosis and had to move various places in the country to try to improve his health which didn't work. Dwingens was there from the fall of 1899 to probably sometime in 1901. We don't exactly know when he left but at the school it had some excellent people as teachers. The lay and decker brothers who were famous for posters back then were teaching and somebody at the time was not famous but became famous was teaching there Fred Gowdy. Gowdy is known as probably the most famous American type designer the first half of the 20th century and at this point he'd only done like one typeface and he'd been a bookkeeper in Detroit before going back to Chicago but he taught a class in decoration and lettering and Dwingens was one of his students. Another student was Oswald Cooper so with Dwingens there Cooper there and Gowdy you have three of the four most important type designers of the first half of the 20th century in America just a strange zeitgeist coincidence. The fourth is Morris Fuller Benton if anybody wants to know. So Gowdy's influence is very important and this is the arts and crafts era and also the art nouveau era in the 1890s but art nouveau doesn't have a big influence in Chicago other than filtered through Will Bradley. It's mainly William Morris's influence in arts and crafts that people are interested in making private presses creating their own typefaces and getting interested in medieval letter forms and early Venetian letter forms you know rugged Roman letter forms and not pale febrile letter forms that were typical of the 19th century were really flowery ones. So what you're seeing are three book plates that Dwingens did in these early years. The one on the left, Perdom Fordeis is actually a wood block and the same with the one for Mabel Hoyle that was his girlfriend at the time became his wife and then Eleanor Siegfried Hadley was a relative on his mother's side the family the Siegfried side and you're seeing I think the influence of Gordon Craig in the Delft Perdom Fordeis one who was a British designer and possibly William Fisher in the one in the middle. These are contemporary people who aren't well known anymore but the lettering is heavy and chunky and deliberately you know in the sort of antique way. These are pieces that Dwingens did circa 1901. The athletics one has definitely been linked to a high school yearbook in his hometown of Cambridge after he graduated he was hired to do cover and a series of headings for the yearbook. The current topics I haven't been able to identify I suspect it might have been a class project and you can see that the illustrations reflect some of the designs of the period that actually one at the top I think is a little bit of white paint on the left of it. The mail pouch I used to think was a student project also but it turns out it was a publication done by some high school students in his hometown of Cambridge a few years after he graduated. All I've ever found out about was a few news items and then this poster. Dwingens as a designer did very few large items he did very few posters or broadsides in his career and this is one of them there's a copy in Boston there's a copy in Washington. The Colorado summer outing is from an ad in House Beautiful that I came across and I think it's a combination of Gowdy and Dwingens. So after Dwingens left the Frank Holmes school and it was a school where you could pay by the week to study so people could just go in and out which makes it really hard to know exactly when he left. But by 1901 1902 he's got a studio with Fred Gowdy on Michigan Avenue and at one point he's actually living with the Gowdy's out in the northern part of Chicago in the street that I can't seem to find the address that exists anymore. But there are definitely some projects that they work together some of them are signed with their initials joined together like DG, D for Dwingens, G for Gowdy and this one looks like Gowdy's lettering and Dwingens' illustration and knowing that Dwingens had done some work for the Santa Fe I'm guessing that this is his design. Usually the first book that's attributed to him is this book The Gift of the Magic Staff in 1901. There's actually a book that comes out a few months earlier that he'd worked on with Fred Gowdy called In a Balcony but this book he did the cover and all the illustrations and one of his fellow students did decorations, Ella Bryson in it. It was a book for children from a religious publishing house. The Inland Printer cover is one that only Dwingens did. It's also an Inland Printer cover where Dwingens and Gowdy combine their talents. This one's 1903 as you can see and he's copied a famous image of Christopher Plantan for the for the illustration and the lettering is following Fred Gowdy. So when I'm talking about the influence of Gowdy the letters that Gowdy was doing influenced by William Morris and this interest in getting back to heavier, stronger letter forms. You find letters that are old style Roman and then Gowdy liked this sort of leaning italic. You can see in the word the with that H that sort of falls over and you can see in The Gift of the Magic Staff that curly T that looks like a C in the word the. You can find that in something Gowdy's work too. This is the the one definite piece that Gowdy, that Dwingens did for the Santa Fe. There's a few pieces of it, not the whole thing up at Boston, the Dwingens collection, but there are other copies and Denver and I believe in San Francisco. I think I found a copy of this one at Stanford. It's a little booklet intended to promote this hotel in New Mexico on the Santa Fe line and Fred Harvey did apparently a series of hotels but all the other books I've seen were done by other people. But Dwingens did the border and the lettering here and if you look carefully you can see his initials, his initial WD. Do I have a pointer on here? Yeah, right here WD and if you look carefully they're flopped so he just took the border and flopped it for the left side. The interior of that book, I'm not showing you, the rest of it has illustrations he did in two different styles and along with photographs of the hotel. So now I'm going to start getting into specific more general styles, things like Roman, Black Letter unshows which those of you who are calligraphers when we're talking about it. So I'm going to show you his Roman capitals as they evolve over time and a lot of these early images in these different styles are going to be from a series of greeting cards that he did for a man in Boston called Alfred Bartlett. So Dwingens after he's working with Gaudi for a year or two in Chicago is kind of getting homesick for his girlfriend in Cambridge for his mother and he never really liked big cities and if you realize that when he was growing up the biggest city he had been in before he went to Chicago was about 15,000 people. Chicago was a million back then so that must have been quite a shock and of course a city that was booming full of stockyards, their smells, elevated all sorts of big city lures and things that wouldn't have found in Cambridge, Ohio or Richmond, Indiana and he went back to Cambridge in the spring of 1903 and tried to set up a private press that was still at the rage to do. Those private press got into muck raking and all sorts of very interesting things besides the usual private press stuff. But then in the summer of 1904 Fred Gaudi who had moved from suburb of Chicago where he had a private press to Massachusetts, Hingham, Massachusetts, a town on the south shore below Boston and Gaudi had moved there because there was arts and crafts society in this small town and after he moved he wanted to ask Oz Cooper to join him but Cooper was busy trying to run the Frank Holm School while Holm was getting his tuberculosis treatments in North Carolina so he asked Dwiggins if he would come and work with him in Hingham and Dwiggins had just gotten married and they went off to Hingham as their honeymoon and lived with the Gaudi's for a couple months in a house that had the Gaudi's, their young son, a giant printing press. It must not a great idea to start your married life and by the early 1905 he and his wife had found a home of their own to rent and they stayed in Hingham for the rest of their life. Dwiggins dying in 1956 his wife in 1968 so once he moved out of Gaudi he also quit working for Gaudi's Village Press and he set up as a freelance designer and among his his first clients was a man named Alfred Bartlett in Boston. Bartlett was a publisher of small books sort of gift books and of greeting cards. He's considered one of the important founders of greeting cards as an industry. He called them motto cards, Dodgers, leaflets, all sorts of other names but he was kind of like a miniature hallmark cards and it was and he was you know following in the arts and crafts tradition and he was trying to have everything a nice a nice handmade paper with decal edges and hiring calligraphers and illuminators to do things and have them printed by people like D.B. Uptight the pre-med printer in Boston. So this is one of these cards you see this one actually has a copyright on it some of them aren't dated some of them we've we've figured out what the dates are and you can see how much better his lettering has gotten. We're talking six years later and excellent Roman capitals including his wives that are curbed we call the Greek fashion and a little bit of italic for the credit for Henry Turner Bailey who was a educator in the arts. There's a tiny book plate he did for himself where it says he has Will Bliggins and his name changes over time to some people he's willy to his mother to his wife he's William to some of his to his early friends and colleagues as Will when he's older he's called Bill to his friends people don't know him call him W.A.D. or Wad or Dwig though he has a cousin who does cartoons is also known as Dwig which can be confusing so here he is as will Dwig and then hang him and this little image of a scribe is a common one that he uses nearly as his typical arts and crafts influence and later on he will get rid of it and then the book you're seeing which is 1906 the the book plate is somewhere between 1905 1906 is it's not dated I'm I'm guessing it's a year or so after he's gotten to hang him and certainly before 1907 1908 the book is dated it's 1906 it was printed by Updike who was a preeminent printer in Boston and becomes an important client along with Bartlett and so he's done just the the binding cover Elliott was president of Harvard and the decoration is his now in making my presentation I've changed the scale of things so you're seeing this book plate on the left way too big compared to the paper promotion on the right but here you can see much more refined elegant Roman capitals so do you think back about those heavy Gaudi-esque ones that I first showed you the the Elizabeth Mary Hill book plate is somewhere around 1908 1909 and of course he's made a pun out of her name and showed her house on a little hill because the illustration is also his what you see on the on the right now I was in Japan is a specimen book for a paper company Strathmore paper 1919 and you can see the style of Roman capitals starts to have little dwiggins features like the way the bottoms of the A's are made or the proportion of the bow of the R to the leg he did the illustration and the entire specimen book is a marvel every image is by him showing work he either had already done or fictitious work and all the all the lettering identifying the different paper stocks and weights is his so that's 1919 I've jumped ahead 10 years with that Strathmore piece about the same time he did this book plate or mailing label for a project that he and his cousin Lawrence Siegfried did they did a little booklet called next tract from investigations into the physical properties of books as they are made and it was a little essentially a diatribe about how poor books in America were and so they had had a label for their business and that archer shows up as a common theme in dwiggins his life and he always described it as shooting for the stars you know aiming high what you're seeing on the right is is original artwork around 1920-21 the book changed its title this is not and so this is not the final artwork but it's got this wonderful Russian iconic image and it's all about the ambassador Russian is experiences during the revolution and afterward this is right after the Russian revolution so Yale University press book so in the early days in Boston in the hangam area dwiggins is working primarily for Bartlett and for Updike doing work all sorts of stuff by the mid by the early teens he gets another patron man named Brad Stevens who's really big on trying to get people in the graphic arts businesses the printing business to cooperate to collaborate on things and he's also very big on direct marketing direct advertising what direct advertising means is any sort of design that goes directly to the customer the client the recipient so instead of putting an ad in a magazine or a newspaper if you mail a letter out to them encourage them to buy something if you send them a catalog you send them a brochure if you all those things are direct advertising it's now I call now it's called direct marketing and he set up a magazine called direct advertising and he got a group of paper companies to sponsor it as a cooperative effort and dwiggins was his prime designer dwiggins did the cover which for about from roughly 1917 to about 1933 looked exactly like this except that each issue had a different color for the paper and different colors for the ink but the exact same design and I think dwiggins played with the colors of those and learned about color by changing them I just chose one that I like the purple on the the blue with the orange you read what's next to it is another paper industry book at which he did through Mr Stevens and that was for two companies that joined up to do a little publication in the mid 20s and there's two different versions of these covers as they change midway this is number 25 out of I think 30 something are done this 1927 and you can see variations in his roman caps especially that the R in paper is a typical dwiggins letter with the way the leg kicks out in the way the bowl is thinner in weight he also did the little mark in the center papers that print it as as a slogan now I'm going back a little bit in time and I'm showing you examples of rustic and rustic like roman capitals for those you know calligraphy don't know calligraphy rustic is a narrow a little more fluid form of of roman capitals that goes back to the roman empire made of graffiti and also as small manuscript letters and dwiggins for some reason has chosen that for this 1909 book cover the rebellion pencil which is about a story about people in china and then a couple years later 1912 he does this this title for a trade magazine advertising and selling he does not only the lettering there but the entire border and you can see the various tools that he's put in as the tools of the trade and lasted only a couple years that they they kept mucking with it they began changing the colors they began changing the border pretty soon the entire thing fell apart was gone you know they didn't appreciate good design model letterhead is done for the same one of the two companies that did the paper book crocker mackalina a paper company up up in um massachusetts and dwiggins did this what it is is the cover of a folder that has samples of paper in size sample letterheads to show you you can do with the stationary and some of those in the portfolios are stationaries by dwiggins some are real designs some are fake designs inside but this cover is a very lovely condensed roman capital and that's from about that's the mid 20s somewhere in 1924 he also did the pattern the stencil pattern around it the new deal in old Rome is a book jacket so dwiggins was doing all this advertising work from 1905 it through the 1920s but he wanted to do books which is typical of people with arts and crafts era and in 1922 when he slash 23 when he discovered he had adult onset diabetes like his father he began telling friends i'm getting out of the advertising business i don't like it i hate it i want to do books but it took him over nearly the end of the decade to really get out he was still doing important advertising work in the early 30s it paid better you know than book work but when he finally uh met his his perfect natural is the alford canop he was a book designer from 1934 to 1956 canop's premier freelance book designer his first books for canop for 1926 but it wasn't until 34 that he was doing entire books and on a regular basis and this is from 1939 the new deal in old Rome which is a which is a play on fdr's new deal linking it to what was happening in old Rome by the author it's the first book to use dwiggins is caledonia typeface and here is used this condensed sort of rustic like roman capitals to suggest old Rome but also to fit the title in a couple other examples the boilstone street magazine which was a magazine for businesses on boilstone street in boston a major shopping street in the back bay dwiggins uh once he decided to be working with Bartlett in 19 uh actually after being working with Bartlett uh Bartlett tried to convince him to move in to his uh space and up like warned him against it but dwiggins decided to take the offer and move from hangum as a studio to boston in 1910 and that was because he'd be closer to his clients much easier to do work not have to not have to commute on the train and up night was right you know up you know he got Bartlett got a lot of work out of him but also he got a lot of new clients that made him move away from Bartlett and as he moved to studio over the next decade he ended up on boilstone street and and that's i probably why the merchants asked him to do the design of their magazine which won't last it for a year or two there's only two issues i've ever seen the warren standard was another paper company job he did a lot of paperwork far more than most people realize uh because of brad stevens and then because of warren warren was part of the original brad stevens consortium but then they left around 1918 but dwiggins did a lot of work with them directly uh through their their their uh publicity person uh from the uh mid teams through their through the mid to late 30s and this is uh a publication that they did in various issues and each one had a different color that illustration is by him it looks like a technical drawing and you have to realize i'm focusing on lettering and calligraphy but dwiggins is is a designer and his day they call them commercial artists and you had to have three in there were three basic skills being doing illustration doing decoration doing lettering some people were good at one dwiggins was good at all three another paper company piece this is for a gummed paper company uh in new jersey and all they were seen of it are reproductions and magazines never the actual item these were gummed labels that you could buy and this one is i think influenced by some german designs at the time this is uh in the in the teens and you'll find some of this sort of loose lettering by dwiggins elsewhere this kind of almost drippy stuff very soft um and the guy is putting paste or gum on paper that's what it didn't last long that is that one so i'm going to move from roman caps to black letter which will make grendel excited or she'll probably not like the actual interpretations the earliest signed or at least dated i should say example of dwiggins's lettering is this piece on the left from a count book of his father's he had a count book of his father's after his father died which he would he would doodle in it it's full of battleships and and and battles and guys in armor and and maps and all sorts of things and there's this bit of lettering which has some lumbardic capitals and then we have this undated sample where he's also got some black letters some some textura like upside down unfortunately i couldn't decide which way to turn it for you guys but you see it's drawn which is not surprising i mean when he was studying with gaudy people drew these letters they didn't realize that you were making them with a broad-edged pen this is before edward johnston did his writing eliminating lettering that's 1906 and this is this is of course america he didn't have a lot of models other than you know zaner bloser or the various pensarian people the pointed pen you know in grocers for some early examples of his black letter the ridge shop that's a woodcut the ridge shop was an attempt at a private press by dwiggins oz cooper and the third student at the frankholm school in park ridge uh illinois which was a suburb of chicago other than this this this this letterhead there's not much that we know they actually accomplished with their with their shop they may have just been a great idea that went nowhere the other three are book plates he did uh in those early years 1900 roughly 1902 the one on the left for claire francis hunter is a woman from his hometown of cambridge who i suspect he might have lived within chicago because at one point she was in chicago as a music teacher but she was a friend of his mother's uh then you see one for himself in the middle which is beautiful bit of fracture in a circle and then the one uh for elegram's rosemont was another in cambridge ohio uh friend of his mother's and that's done in rotunda so we've got a couple different styles of that he's playing with a black letter and you have to realize when he's doing this you know gaudy is is interested in black because that's a medieval thing that morris would have been interested so black letter and heady romans but this is quite a variety of styles and he must have been learning some of these things from books and that's what i've been trying to track down because there aren't very many sources there's only a couple a couple books available in england and fewer in the united states that will show you examples so now we're back to to hang them and working for alfred bartlett and this is a bigger type of greeting card it's this you know about six by nine and i've actually tracked down where you got the b from uh i mean he's copying things from books it was typical all the day first that's how you learned but also everybody did that i mean you're expected to copy things the four episodes from the york mysteries only shows up in reproduction in various magazines as an example of his work i've never found the exact the the actual publication it's 1906 uh he did some work for the tavern club which was a private club in boston through db updike but i don't know how he got this particular job might have been through heintzeman another printer in boston where he briefly suppose he had desk space meaning he had a desk to work at but not renting a room or anything the salon certificate is 1907 for this photography organization and once again i've only found it as a reproduction but i i'm just i just find those capital s and c amazing and i wonder where he got the t from i'm sure i've seen that initial t somewhere you know from some printed book probably an incanabula period and everything is handwritten on these pages i mean there's no type on either of these other than the credit that came from the magazine at the bottom of the one on the left now these are two more cards reading cards the one in green is not for alfred barlett barlett had a colleague edwin grove edwin grover who ended up in chicago and he was working with the publishers there but he also was trying to have a small press and to do typical arts and craft stuff called the canterbury company and they also apparently made chocolates and they made children's toys along with their little booklets and reading cards and the one on the one in green comes from i believe the canterbury uh company it's signed with a little d in the lower left right here as an indication of dwiggins he signs these things in various ways in the early days this one's not signed at all the circa 1906 is i think dorthy abbey's uh notation about what she thought it was done it's certainly earlier than the other one which is probably 1908 and one of my favorites is this one uh here's to the and my folks from me and my folks an old quaker health health means a greeting you know to your health and dwiggins uh his his parents were a mixed marriage his mother was a baptist and his father was a quaker and that was a problem not for them for other people quakers don't recognize mixed marriages and so there's no record of dwiggins being born or or his father getting married because the quakers wouldn't you know you can find his father in records but not his mother or him and his wife was a quaker and they had to elope with his mother the baptist permission and his mother and his wife got kicked out of the quakers premiering a baptist or at least or at least the son of a of a woman who was a baptist so i'm wondering if the quaker thing you know was to it was to his heart his wife was always a quaker but i love that age that age is stunning uh i'm sure he's found he's found a source right now at this point i'm thinking that a lot of his uh sources may have come from uptike his uptike was a printer who did a lot of research into uh printed books and i know that in the work that dwiggins did from uptike would often loan him books as source material to copy and so he may have found a lot of stuff through uptike not through libraries or museums or printed books uh the romantic germany is one of the nicest of his early book jackets that he did along with the vermilion pencil 1909 and that y is a typical dwiggins y in black litter the way he's got the the bottom with the tail coming off diagonally print was an early brad stevens publication that preceded direct advertising it's not the same as print magazine that just i went out of business about a year ago it's totally separate though apparently had a huge circulation 10 000 copies but it's hard to find them and like the direct advertising what he did for this was he kept changing the colors but left the design the same with that strange uh decorative p and the idea of mixing black litter and roman that you're seeing in a lot of these things was typical of fred gaudy's work and you know it seemed to me you know some of the wiggins like to do also here's an example of rotunda from these little parts it's the same set as that one i showed you earlier that was in roman caps uh for alfred barlett and once again i think he is following printed examples for that capital i that's a capital i if you don't recognize that red thing then we got sort of a bit hard example over on the left also for alfred barlett and then what you're seeing on the right is a frontispiece for a book that updike printed that was for charles jefferson a reverend who was apparently a fairly famous pastor in new york but it turns out he had grown up that jefferson came from cambridge ohio and i wonder if twigans ever realized he was working with a fellow kenta bridgian uh from there but for that book the called the christmas builders dwiggins did uh the jacket he did the frontispiece the title page and a couple illustrations it was one of his biggest projects for updike it's 1909 and so that border is dwiggins illustration is his and the uh sort of batard-like lettering is his in red the border actually is a copy of one i think from the renaissance i've found it a couple months ago so we've seen a lot of black letter by dwiggins and it's all very early it's all before 1910 and after that it kind of disappears from his work it's really hard to find examples of it you can find roman caps all the way through his career into the fifties but he gets out of black letter and part of that is getting away from the william morris arts and crafts archaic medieval thing and that you can ascribe to updike's influence updike you know seeing that as you know a backward-looking thing you know but also the clients you know he's doing commercial work and when he starts doing book we start getting into book design in the 20s it's not needed as much but if it's needed if it's right for the topic if it's the subject so the scarlet letter and what he's doing the scarlet letter he's trying to make a book that looks like not the days of hester prinn but the days of net the angle hawthorne the 1840s so he's got this sort of victorian black letter it's beautifully done it's but it's not what you'd find if done by a proper calligrapher it's more of a letterer is a drawn pointed pen black letter gunner's daughter from a from a scandinavian author it's a good unset uh he figured he had to have this this black letter for the tail and that's his illustration and the signature most people know of is wad in the upper left corner the the the last things that i've been able to find chronologically of his in black letter are these two pieces the daily jeffersoni was for his hometown newspaper this was done for their celebration uh in the 1940s and it's a very stiff black letter it's very atypical of dwiggins uh that the way the jeffersonian is done uh the decorations are his very typical of what he's very famous for his uh stencil ornaments it's an interesting mix of items this is on the late 40s and then at the same time he did a paper promotion for eastern paper company they did a series of broad sides intended to promote their paper but talking about different typefaces and it's odd that dwiggins chose cheltonum a typeface that most people of his generation hated and he may not have cared what the typeface was he may thought it was kind of an interesting choice that nobody else would choose it i'll choose it but it's very odd the way he did this black letter for they might notice the cheltonum typeface that birch from grover goodhue did in uh circa 19 well late 1890s but it came out in 1902 and 1904 and goodhue designed cheltonum had been a former colleague of up dykes he was an architect he did a couple famous churches in new york i think uh west point the nebraska state capital but along with this uh this interesting chelton i like the a and lantic and the b and bond the c i'm not sure i go i go for in chelton but the star of this is not the black letter it's that decorative a that's what that blue and red explosion is that's an a one of dwiggins is stencil designs not black letter but it's certainly cool i've cropped the image to focus in on the lettering so you go to the cheltonum most of it's off to the side or it's just here this is a cheltonum typeface right here which was one of the most popular typefaces in the 20th century a few unshills a little art nouveau we're getting to the end now if i was doing this as a chronological history of dwiggins rather than the survey of lettering i would have had this image on the left very quickly and i usually read the whole thing this is his announcement going freelance in 1905 it's totally hand lettered and it's in a mix of upper and lower case letters unshillesque and what's interesting about it is he began he got interested in doing an unshill-based typeface in the 40s and the typeface looks a lot like this he's had he had these letter forms in his head for decades even though he claimed that the typeface came from looking at various paleographical books and you can see some some similar letters in this greeting card on the right a friend's rebuked so what i'm talking about unshill if you don't know it it was a roman lettering style and unlike rustic which is condensed and save space unshill saves you time but it's wide and more legible so instead of having like a square shaped e it's like a roundy and it has letters that to the uninitiated look like small letters but they're technically capital so letters pop up and dropped out a little bit and so you can so there's a couple in here the g's in beggarly and the way he's uh there's the other ones i wanted yeah so the capital r mixed in in this f it's not an unshill in a pure historical way it's got the unshillesque qualities and he's did a couple uh cards with this mixed case style and then it kind of disappears until the mid thirties and he's asked in nineteen i gotta stop in two minutes apparently uh he i'm looking at the clock he gets asked by uh he's he's he's they're doing a special uh insert into a magazine called the dolphin in the mid thirties about dwiggins's work and philip hofer of harvard insists that the insert should include an original hand-done booklet so dwiggins does a little story of his own and writes it out in this unshillesque hand and is printed on it very thin uh a uh chinese or japanese paper it's beautiful the illustration by him in red this is a detail complete with his correction you see the e where he misspelled something he didn't go back and redo he just stuck it in and it's kind of quickly done this somebody made a tight face based on this and it's unfortunate because the crudeness is fine on this paper but when you see it digitally it loses its quality uh and then towards the end of his life he did a little broadside quote from hawk aside uh about being old but still being able to do things i think we checked which was encouraging him and that's a detail right blew up the lettering this is 1949 so he's he's born 1880 he's now 69 years old and he's got he's going to have cataracts in a year or two he's got problems with his hand writing um so it's pretty good isn't it i mentioned art nouveau and these are two of the more surprising things to find in his work where you're seeing the thumb a shot is a proof for uh musical score with updike he did a lot of musical scores he did a lot of covers not the interiors the interiors were printed by the printers of uh g schirmer schirmer but updike would do the covers or sometimes introductory pages and a lot of them were uh lettered or decorated by dwiggins this one's unusual because it has this sort of art nouveau lettering whoops i didn't mean to do that i was trying to do that uh oh now we're all screwed up i'm not used to here we are will that do it sorry i'm not used to pcs anyway the thumb a shot has a little bit of the looseness of art nouveau and i keep thinking he he took that image of the woman in the cat from a french poster but i can't find it in steinland i'm still looking to figure out i know i've seen it somewhere the league of friends is not signed by him uh somebody i think uh ray nash attributed to him but it comes from a group of cards that were probably done for mr grover in chicago and it's definitely copying george orial's lettering who was a french uh art nouveau artist of the 1890s early 20th century and as cooper copied orial's lettering so it's possible that this actually is not dwiggins and as cooper but i like to think it's dwiggins though we're never going to get through the rest of it so i'm going to have to quit if you're going to have time so i'm just going to show i'll just flip through these because they want to give they want to have 15 minutes for questions so this is upper and lower case or book hand and what you're seeing a lot is drawn letters not always calligraphic ones that is not written directly with a pen these are these are greeting cards from the 1905 1910 period this is a little sample from a from a book for uh teaching children art it was a series of books done by grover's publishing company in chicago by a woman who was an important art educator of the time and a lot of stuff in there which is not signed is by dwiggins this one has a little tiny wad on it these are pages from little books he did and that a is i think taken from airheart rat dolt those that's entirely written out both of those there's no type in either of these and the same with this uh little uh motto for uh the the louis praying company did 1911 there's two different versions of that different colors and then you're seeing his certificate he gave out to his fictitious society of calligraphers honorary members with koba daishi writing across the water and a stencil tea and this one was done for fred gaudy you couldn't you couldn't join his society you had to be invited is that the end no it can't be there's a famous chart from his his uh booklet on the investigation of physical properties of books showing book quality going downhill so that's drawn letters so it could bust apart and then his little book the fabulous he's totally written it out by hand that's a story of his of his own 1921 these are things from his paperwork through brad stevens more for the paperwork for sd warren these are all 1920s book jacket for alfred kenop from the 1930s more for alfred kenop from the 30s his own book land advertising this is a second edition from the 40s and you're seeing original artwork on the left on the on the left you're seeing um lettering illustration and borders for an edition of melton that he did for updike in 1907 and then next to it a card for out for alfred barlett printed by updike another card for barlett and his announcement of moving into boston and he's gotten rid of his scribe his monk is scribe and replaced it with a guy he calls the digger and a quotation from voltair about tending your own garden and that became his little mod this little figure for a couple years his little symbol and this is actually the draft updike convinced him to get rid of the italic and replace it with type which it looked better updike was right on the left is the uh the rules of being a member of the society of calligraphers if you're an honorary member which are pretty easy and then uh page of a little booklet for the telephone company that was given out to new employees entirely handwritten the booklet another example of his work for updike in in sheet music that's a proof that's why there's black bars around it and that entire thing is hand drawn and there's some other versions where type replaces his lettering for editions in different in different countries the the sofa is from a ad in a vogue magazine uh for paint furniture company in boston he did i don't know 300 or so ads for them this is one of the biggest that's his lettering no type at all there's the envelope for a society of calligraphers he didn't do a lot of squashes you'll notice he was he was very restrained in his work this is the one time when he decided to go to town letter to his friend riddle for zika inviting him to be an honorary member of the society so you can see his handwriting done very carefully trying to look fancy but still handwriting and then next to it a page from uh one of his book on marionettes which was hand written out at the end of the 30s some examples of jeez i'm sorry too close to the mic examples of little labels for himself and it's fascinating in the in the bottom of the library to see all the variations as he's trying out different designs and there's artwork there's white it out there's inked in that's changed and so you can see in in the one right um like i'm a point the one on the upper right you can see the white paint that's oxidized uh and he'd like these combinations of scripts and roman cat and roman letters very wonderful combinations if you see how his name is w. doigens and script then 30 levitt street and upper and lower case and capitals and different ways of mixing up those those styles uh he began to get a very distinctive personal script and his that he and it's essentially a pointed pen letter that he would put his own uh fix and thins in you know noodle it up sometimes let's leave it and you can see it here on these and there's two pieces for war in about 1922 where you're seeing as a ghost behind the one on the left is a questionnaire that printers are supposed to do so they can keep track of jobs uh original artwork for his uh book um Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde so these are chapter headings and parts of the title original artwork on the left for an sd war in the 1930s piece and another one on the right and he had an interesting fat face letter you see the words cumberland dull that he began doing somewhere in the 1920s into the early 30s this is from an ink blotter for a friend of his who was a printer he sent out i think four of them this one has a lot of lettering out the ones that really beautiful illustrations uh they're from roughly 1936 37 and here is some of his other sort of casual script styles a little ad for a jewelry company about 1912 and then his little publication when he was trying to do printing uh in the early teens that's him saying hello by near the curtain and my favorite probably dwiggins design of all time is new ideas and illustration you can sit there in your easy easy chair with your airbrush and your little stencil and your your your faithful uh man will pump the air pressure and you can do automatic art that's from 1915 for war and there's actually several versions of that and then a book played for he and his wife with a little uh stencil figure that he reuses a lot to scryphon and i don't know what bite of nebo means i still can't find it it's got to be some play on latin but look at that l through lebrous isn't that stunning he made his own checks we should all do that here's a couple of them book played for the local library his wife was a member of the women's club book plays for neighbors in hangam and here's a couple sketches along with the final one in red but i kind of like the other two on the right and those crazy runic letters top and bottom for his marionette performances he made tickets so it's all hand lettered and individually colors color stenciled so there are copies without the colors book jacket for the founder of esquire it's an interesting book actually to read but that and then on the binding for john hersey's belfridano in the 40s one more spring the call of fun just to see some his scripts he doesn't do formal pointed scripts you will not find a nice spencerian or or english roundhand or copperplate and probably my favorite of his scripts is uh the text for his edition of po that he did for lakeside press all the images have captions handwritten out and that's a detail on the right so he could do very consistent if he wanted to they didn't have to be these loose styles another one for strathmore in the early 30s and from a book on american alphabets he contributed this wiry monoline script you could probably make it out of wire we can't go through it all but that one's interesting that's a very unusual thing to see for duwiggins uh for life magazine this is not the life of pictures this is life the humor magazine and he briefly did covers and then went back to the old style people didn't like his covers millennium one was a book uh was it was a marionette play he did and that's his own cover the sportsman other 1920s magazine does that fat face they talk about and then the purchase is a little uh label for alfred konoff briefly a direct advertising changes covers for like three issues went back to the other one but i like this one on the left and rags was another uh paper company promotion he did three or four issues of theirs the most interesting of them oh i don't have it here i'll have it later some book jackets i'm sorry book jackets for konoff you don't find much much in the way of san serif in his work but this early magazine the initial and the courthel booklet which is out alfred bartlett publication uh original artwork for a story by his cousin lauren siegfried and an early book a book a binding for konoff very strange homer in the sagebrush with a weird mix of lowercase and cap letters at lowercase a this was a little seal for a paper company they briefly used it went back to a crappy one a uh another paper company's piece from 1913 the person dictated the letter and then he did a little uh air he did little um mailing label stamps later in his life and this is the airmail one he also did first class and and postage due paper company on the left above the paper illustration i love the way the woman is leaning on an invisible armchair and knew i'd use an illustration a different version with a guy with a giant bow tie these are from the teens another book plate for a friend and notice how he put his his initials in on the left wad and the date 1929 on the right his own book paragraphs of stories and a book plate and a little invitation card for a friend of his he did all the invitations for over a decade for mr. pepper this is the best of them all open spread from magazine for filings the department store called clothes and that's wiggins illustrations densel and his lettering james canes serenade in the 30s this is the uh binding the jacket is also famous but the black binding is pretty cool in in silver stamping and then uh you're earlier this other one is an offset apparently the one on the right not letterpress that's why you see that tonal variation and my favorite rags and paper is that one that is a stunning mix of letter forms it just looks like a frosty on the cake he always was the contrary and so for his typefaces he didn't put his typefaces on the covers of their brochures he put hand lettering on so here's his his specimen announcing his caledonia type there's no caledonia type on it on the cover and there's that same style of letters you see in caledonia in the borzoy reader for khanaf in 36 and then around that time he made what were called plimpton initials done for a printing company in uh massachusetts called the plimpton press which did all his books for khanaf and he made a series of four initials only for their use and this is a decorative this is one of the decorative ones i was trying to stay away from type but i had to show you a little bit uh this is from that same little insert that had the unshel the drum's the calcapan and you can see the illustration and this odd fat lettering in sailor which his typed company wanted to turn into a typeface and he tried a few examples and gave up and there they are and there you can see a little bit of artwork for the callathon a magazine in this style before he did the plimpton initials earlier in the 30s and another one of the plimpton initials and a few random sketches of letters and that's it uh i was speeding through because he told me to finish by 715