Paul Shaw Letter Design

Sign for Savoy Taylors Guild Ltd., The Strand, London (c.1906).

Sgraffito on a wall in the Giudecca section of Venice.

Detail of a neon sign for a barbershop in Grottaferrata, Italy.

Detail of page from Les Ecritures Financiere, et Italienne-Bastarde (1647) by Louis Barbedor, a French writing master.

Detail of store sign for Cortese Frizzoti in Venice. The letters in black have been painted over a gold ground which covers a former store name in mosaic tile.

Medieval inscription in Round Gothic capitals. In the cloister of S. Giovanni in Laterano in Rome.

Capital E and G stencils from collection of Eric Kindel, Reading, England.

Ghost signs with printer’s fist on wall of Rue de la Commune in Montreal.

Detail of painted directional sign for Coney Island covering mosaic sign indicating Up Town Trains. 53rd Street station of the R line in Brooklyn.

Punches for punctuation cut by Giambattista Bodoni at the Museo Bodoniano in Parma, Italy.

Detail of cover of Warren’s Standard Printing Papers specimen book by S.D. Warren (1929). Design, ornament and lettering by W.A. Dwiggins.

17 November 2019

Blue Pencil

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 219—The Long Men of Lampanzie

The Long Men of Lampanzie was a fantasy written by Laurance B. Siegfried and serialized in Happyland magazine from December 1913 to May 1914. Due to the demise of the magazine in the fall of 1914, only the first seven chapters were published in Siegfried’s lifetime. However, in 2003, Melissa Austen Langeland published a limited edition of the The Long Men of Lampanzie: A Tale of the Faraway Land of Lurg which contained twenty-two chapters. [1] Langeland, the great-granddaughter …
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14 November 2019

Blue Pencil

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 87—Happyland

The Young Idea: A Magazine of Character Study, Questions of the Hour, Field Work in Botany, Birds and Insects. Sample page from 1905.
The Round Robin: An Illustrated Magazine; Good Reading for Boys & Girls vol. XXVI, no. IV (April 1913). Cover design signed WV.
From The Young Idea to Happyland
At the beginning of 1913 Lawrence A. Rankin (1887–1955) took over The Young Idea, a monthly children’s magazine which had been in existence for twenty-five years. He renamed it The …
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16 October 2019

Blue Pencil

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 170—Cuba Libre Smoker; a correction to The Definitive Dwiggins no. 169

In the addendum of The Definitive Dwiggins no. 169—”Der Professorverein” I identified a photograph in the John Francis Holme Collection at the University of Arizona as having been connected to the Second Saturday Evening Saturnalia of Der Professorverein of the Frank Holme School of Illustration at The Monroe restaurant on October 27, 1900. [1] I was wrong. I recently came across another copy of the photograph in a scrapbook prepared by members of the Palette & Chisel Club in Chicago. All …
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LEGACY OF LETTERS

HELVETICA SUBWAY

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CODEX, the journal of letterforms

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