William Addison Dwiggins

Dwiggins’ decision to get out of advertising had been building for six or seven years. In March 1922 he found himself unable to complete a job for his friend Carl Purington Rollins, printer to Yale University. “I am really puzzled to know what has bitten me, some kind of stage-fright, or else I am nicked for the time being in my inventive faculties. Other work has gone sour in the same manner.” The problem was not stage-fright but adult-onset diabetes, the same disease that contributed to his father’s death from pneumonia at the age of 39. Dwiggins was luckier than his father. By the time the diabetes was diagosed in 1923, insulin had been discovered. Although the diagnosis was not a death-sentence, Dwiggins used it as an excuse to change careers. In June he wrote Rollins, “Me I am a happy invalid and it has revolutionized my whole attack. My back is turned on the more banal kind of advertising, and I have cancelled all commissions and am resolutely set on starving. I shall undertake only the simple childish little things like YUP (Yale University Press) imprints that call for no compromise with the universal twelve-year-old mind of our purchasing public and I will produce art on paper and wood after my own heart with no heed to any market. Revolution, stark and brutal.” The revolution was not as stark as Dwiggins had expected. Advertising was more lucrative than book illustration or book design. He continued to do advertising work, especially for Direct Advertising (the house organ of the Paper Makers Advertising Club) and S.D. Warren, through the 1920s and did not entirely abandon the field until the early 1940s.



Fig. 1: William Addison Dwiggins at his desk 1942. Photograph by Randall Abbott.
Fig. 2: Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Baron Corvo (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1937). Jacket design by William Addison Dwiggins.
Fig. 3: Faust Parts One & Two by Goethe (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1941). Jacket design by William Addison Dwiggins. The only type is the translation information on the front.
Fig. 4: Java Head by Joseph Hergesheimer (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946). Binding design by William Addison Dwiggins.
Fig. 5: The Song-Child: Songs for School, Home & Kindergarten (Boston Music Company, 1909). Sheet music title page with border and illustration by William Addison Dwiggins. Printed by The Merrymount Press.