Dwiggins, W A
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Artist.
(1880-1956) US author on typography, greatly influential book designer and, through his association with the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, creator of at least a dozen typefaces, the most famous of them being Electra and Caledonia; from 1922 he called himself a "graphic designer", and is credited with inventing the term. Dwiggins is known within the sf field for designing and illustrating the luxurious 1931 edition of H G Wells's The Time Machine. Often in collaboration with George Salter after 1934, he was instrumental from the early 1920s in establishing the calligraphy-dominated look of the publisher Alfred A Knopf.
Dwiggins's sf play, Millennium 1 (1945) – published in an edition he designed and illustrated – depicts an ambiguous Utopia in which Machines have revolted and humans must fight to recover their hegemony. [JC]
William Addison Dwiggins
born Martinsville, Ohio: 19 June 1880
died Hingham, Massachusetts: 25 December 1956
works
- Millennium 1 (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1945) [play: hb/George Salter]
works as designer
- H G Wells. The Time Machine: An Invention; and Designs by W A Dwiggins (New York: Random House, 1931) [chap: reprints 1895 edition with the addition of a new preface by Wells: illus/hb/W A Dwiggins]
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