William Addison Dwiggins

The Art Deco-esque stencil designs found on Dwiggins’ Knopf bindings and elsewhere are one of his trademarks. They originated in the early 1920s as decorative elements – inspired by the “stamped congeries of sprigs and flowers” of Indian printed cottons – cut on the plank side of maple and cherry wood and then rubber stamped in combinations to form patterns and illustrations. But this technique proved too cumbersome and by 1927 Dwiggins had discovered that cutting elements – both natural (leaves, stems, flowers) and geometric (dots, circles, triangles, lines, etc.) – from celluloid was easier. In Paraphs (1928) he assembled ornamental compositions from these basic units and in Clothes (1929), a magazine published by Filene’s, he discovered how to use them pictorially. Dwiggins later applied his stencil technique to type design, a procees explained in WAD to RR, A Letter about Designing Type (1940).



Fig. 1: Border for title page of Streets in the Moon by Archibald MacLeish (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926). Probably made from woodcut stencil elements.
Fig. 2: Color comp of advertisement “The Pageant of Color / Champagne” for Old Hampshire Bond paper. The illustration is based on the work of Jean Pillement, an 18th century French artist known for his chinoiserie.
Fig. 3: Warren Old Style Antique Laid. Page from S.D. Warren & Co. paper specimen box 1928. Illustration and lettering by William Addison Dwiggins.