Dwiggins was in his late 40s when he began his career in type design. Born in 1880 in Martinsville, Ohio he spent his childhood and adolescence in a series of towns in Ohio and Indiana. He attended the Frank Holme School of Illustration in Chicago where his fellow students included
Oswald Cooper and the faculty included
Frederic W. Goudy. From 1901 to 1903 he shared a studio with Goudy before returning to Cambridge, Ohio to set up a private press. He married Mabel Hoyle, his high school sweetheart, in late 1904 and soon after he rejoined Goudy who had moved his Village Press earlier that year to Hingham, Massachusetts, a small town south of Boston. Dwiggins only stayed with Goudy until May 1905 before striking out on his own as a freelance commercial artist.
Over the next two and half decades Dwiggins built up a thriving career doing lettering, decorative work and illustration for printers, advertising agencies, magazines, book publishers, paper mills and a wide range of local businesses. Most of his clients were in Boston and New England, but some were as far away as New York, Philadelphia and Cleveland. In the years before World War I the steadiest of these clients were Alfred Bartlett, publisher of The Cornhill Booklet and Arts & Crafts ephemera, D.B. Updike of the Merrymount Press, and The Cowen Company, an advertising agency. In subsequent years his major clients were the Paine Furniture Company, S.D. Warren, Direct Advertising (the organ for the Paper Makers Advertising Club), Harvard University Press and Yale University Press.
Fig. 1: . “A Map from the 1704 English Edition of Los Gouditajos”. William Addison Dwiggins’s satirical contribution to Diggings from Many Ampersandhogs by The Typophiles (1937), a collection of ampersands and essays about the ampersand. William Addison Dwiggins was poking fun at Fred Goudy, his former teacher and another contributor to the book.
Fig. 2: “Willie Dwiggins” doodling by William Addison Dwiggins 1880s in German Studies: A Complete Course of Instruction in the German Language.
Fig. 3: Announcement of William Addison Dwiggins’s availability as a freelance designer 1905. First instance of his uncial lettering that eventually led to Winchester Uncial typeface.
