"W. A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design"

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

In case you still haven't heard:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/letterformarchive/w-a-dwiggins-a-life-in-design?token=80d07c32

William Addison Dwiggins was a genius, and I don't use that term lightly. This is a much-needed book that apparently took 14 years to complete.

The promotional price of $79 for the book will expire in about two days.

A note on shipping outside the US: it's very expensive. An option was added to ship two copies for the same shipping cost, if you can find a buddy to order with.

Stephen Coles

Thanks for posting this, Hrant. Three of the many reasons I’m sincerely stoked about this book:

• It’s remarkable that a man who produced five or so lifetimes of work has yet to have a proper monograph or biography. On the other hand, I guess it’s understandable, given how difficult it is to cover the breadth of WAD’s output and its many intricate connections. Bruce did just that.
• Most commercial publishers would not produce a book at this standard. Even the non-deluxe edition (printed with stochastic screens, Smyth-sewn, entirely US-made) contradicts the current trend for cheap printing and subpar reproduction. The images in this book are as real as you can get to the original material; and I know this because I’ve stood in the room with the fancy camera rig as Rob Saunders and the folks at Letterform Archive sweated over every capture.
• This is the first test of the Archive’s nascent publications program. Their mission is to collect and preserve this stuff, but also to share it in a way that does it justice.

Chris Lozos

Glad to see they made their bidding total!  [I love the smell of books in the morning]

John Savard

Caledonia is a very popular typeface; one very tiny footnote to the career of W. A. Dwiggins that few people know is this: the symbols "dek" and "el", used for a while by the Duodecimal Society of America (now the Dozenal Society of America), and which received sufficient public notice that they appeared in a "new math" textbook I used in junior high, were designed by W. A. Dwiggins.

Josh_F

While expensive, it is nice to see it being printed in the States. I'm always so jealous of my European friends, specifically Dutch, that domestically have access to fantastic printers and binderies.

Craig Eliason

A new Kickstarter for a reprint of the book has launched.