5 April 2017
Three years ago I wrote a long post about the history and demographics of the AIGA medalists. Three of the overlooked names I listed are being honored this year: Nancy Skolos (with her husband and partner Tom Wedell), Art Chantry and Lance Wyman. This is a positive step, though I wish that among the six honorees there were some from the past as there was in 2014. At the top of my list would be Oswald Cooper, Helen Dryden …
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5 March 2017
In 1909 W.A. Dwiggins designed a bookplate for Mary Elizabeth Church, the proprietor of Miss Church’s School for Girls on Beacon Street in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. It is not a significant design visually, but the correspondence surrounding it is of some interest. [1]
The origins of the project are murky. Despite the voluminous correspondence between Dwiggins and Daniel Berkeley Updike that survives, there are no letters from the latter commissioning the bookplate. The commission may have been an …
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19 February 2017
W.A. Dwiggins’ work for Harper’s Magazine did not end with the appearance of tailpiece no. 7 in the August 1926 issue. In the November 1930 issue a new series of decorative elements—headpieces, tailpieces and column frames—began to appear. They are abstract rather than pictorial or floral like the first series. Although there is no documentation about their origin, I have some speculative ideas about how they came to be.
At the time that Dwiggins was redesigning Harper’s Magazine in 1925 a …
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