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In Layout in Advertising, published in October 1928, W. A. Dwiggins pointedly left sans serifs out of his survey of advertising typefaces. Gothic the newspaper standby in its various manifestations has little to commend it, he wrote, except simplicity; it is not overly legible, it has no grace. Gothic capitals are indispensable, but there are no good Gothic capitals. The typefounders will do a service to advertising if they will
[...]Mergenthaler was so confident in Dwiggins’ potential as a type designer that in May 1929 they signed him to an exclusive contract (at $ 2500 per year) months before his sans serif was completed. The company wanted to snatch him away from potential rivals such as American Type Founders, Barnhart Brothers & Spindler and Continental Typefounders, all of whom had expressed an interest in commissioning type from him. The National Display Alphabet Co., makers of Innes Alphabets – alphabets
[...]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
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