Paul Shaw Letter Design

Blue Pencil

Blue Pencil is a “slog”: a slow blog. It does not get updated daily or even on a regular schedule. Instead, it gets updated when there is something of value to be posted. Postings often take a long time to prepare and appear at intervals of a few weeks or even months. Sometimes there is a flurry of postings within the span of a few days. Blue Pencil may be unpredictable in its frequency, but not in its purpose. Blue Pencil is fiercely dedicated to the 3Rs: research, reading and writing.

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7 February 2016

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 25 addendum no. 2—Bewick, Updike and Dwiggins

As I have already written, much of the illustrative and decorative work that W.A. Dwiggins did for D.B. Updike and The Merrymount Press involved copying and adapting older work. A good instance of this is the vignette on the title page of Letters of Bulwer-Lytton to Macready 1836–1866 edited with an introduction by Brander Matthews (Newark: The Carteret Book Club, 1911).
Title page of Letters of Bulwer-Lytton to Macready 1836–1866 (Newark: The Carteret Book Club, 1911). Designed by D.B. Updike and printed …
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5 December 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 25 addendum: Imitation vs. assimilation

In tracking down potential sources of influence on Dwiggins as an illustrator I got in touch with Roger Reed of Illustration House, Inc. He is the son of Walt Reed (1917–2015), founder of Illustration House and author of many books on the history of illustration, including The Illustrator in America (2001, third edition). Reed, who has inherited his father’s expertise, suggested I look at the “Chicago School” of illustrators such as J.C. Leyendecker, Harrison Fisher and Henry Hutt …
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3 December 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 25—Imitation, Derivation and Inspiration

In a previous post on W.A. Dwiggins I investigated the drawings of The Brownies he copied as a child from books written by their originator Palmer Cox. The practice of copying other artists stayed with Dwiggins throughout his entire professional career. Sometimes he imitated a style while at other times he copied a composition in toto or in part. It was part and parcel of the practice of being a commercial artist.
In Chicago 1899–1903
Dwiggins left Ohio in the fall of …
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29 October 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 23—Brownies

The Boston Public Library is the repository of the Dwiggins Collection. In the initial deposit of 1974 (Box 35, Folder 14) there are some items from Dwiggins’ childhood and adolescence. One is a set of four small sheets of paper tied together at one corner by a decorative yellow twill cord. On each sheet there is a single drawing in pencil signed with a script “WAD”. There is no title nor text except on one sheet where “William Addison Dwiggins …
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26 October 2015

Ansprache im Goethejahr 1949

I stopped into Argosy Books last week for the first time in several decades. In the $10 bin near the cash register I came across a dog-eared copy of Toward Balzac by Harry Levin (New York: New Directions, 1947) with a cover design by Alvin Lustig (in blue rather than the beige usually seen). Before I could decide whether to buy it or not, my attention was distracted by the next item in the bin: Ansprache im Goethejahr 1949 by Thomas …
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25 October 2015

The Rchive no. 21—Poets’ Row in Denver

In August I conducted a lettering walk in Denver for TypeCon 2015. As part of my preparation I spent the day before walking and driving around the city. My chauffeur and cicerone was Diane Wray Tomasso, former New York graphic designer and Denver preservationist, an excellent repository of knowledge of the city’s architectural heritage past and present. One part of the city which we visited but which did not make it into the TypeCon 2015 lettering walk was Poets’ …
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17 August 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 21—Dear Diego

While preparing a biography of TDC medalist Louise Fili for the Type Directors Club website, I reread Elegantissima: The Design & Typography of Louise Fili (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). In the section on her work for Pantheon Books I noticed (p. 22) something familiar about the jacket design for Dear Diego by Elena Poniatowska (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).
Dear Diego by Elena Poniatowska (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). Jacket design by Louise Fili.
Fili had taken …
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16 August 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 20—A Calendar of Happy Days

This post—originally written in 2015—was updated and corrected in 2021. See The Definitive Dwiggins no. 720.
Recently I was reorganizing my Dwiggins images and came across a folder labeled “The Printing Studio (WAD & TMC)” consisting of downloaded pages from an issue of The Inland Printer, one of which included a page from “A Calendar of Happy Days” signed WAD while another showed some lettering signed C (for Thomas Maitland Cleland). The Dwiggins work is a bit of a mystery.
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15 August 2015

Blue Pencil no. 22 addendum

Several years ago I posted a bibliography of books by and about Hermann Zapf (Blue Pencil no. 22). At the time Jerry Kelly indicated I had missed several (see Blue Pencil no. 23), but never provided me with their titles or other information. Since then Akira Kobayashi has obligingly sent me one of the missing items. Here are the details:
Zapf Exhibition: The Calligraphy of Hermann & Gudrun Zapf
Akira Kobayashi, Juzo Takaoka and Masao Takaoka
Tokyo: Japan Letter Arts Forum, …
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24 July 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 17—The Relationship of W.A. Dwiggins and Percy Grassby

Moving announcement from The Occasional Bulletin of the White Elephant (1915). Map designed by W.A. Dwiggins.
The week before Thanksgiving in 1914 W.A. Dwiggins moved into a new studio—with “Chinese tea-paper walls—at 26 Lime Street in Boston. Dwiggins announced his move in January 1915 via the publication of the first (and only) issue of The Occasional Bulletin of the White Elephant which contained a map showing both his old address at 69 Cornhill and the new one at 26 Lime Street. …
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22 July 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 19—Untrustworthy sources

In researching W.A. Dwiggins for over thirty years I have come across many untrustworthy sources, including Dorothy Abbe, the executor of his estate, and even Dwiggins himself. I was reminded of this yesterday when, at the Thomas J. Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I came across the New York Times obituary for Dwiggins. Although it was not new to me, I had not read it in several decades and thus had forgotten how many mistakes it contained.
The …
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21 July 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 18—L’Afficheur

“L’Afficheur” by Edmé Bouchardon
W.A. Dwiggins was not always an original illustrator or ornamentalist. He copied the work of Pillement, Flaxman, Choffard, Callot and Bouchardon among others. Not only did his clients—most notably Daniel Berkeley Updike—ask him to copy the work of these artists and illustrators of the past, but sometimes he did so on his own initiative. One such instance is a paper sample insert designed for International Covers*, a Chemical Paper Company brand.
The insert, titled “Old Fashioned Advertising & …
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20 May 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 16—A snowy visit to Boston, part II: Diagrams and maps

During my Boston trip Elizabeth Resnick and I had appointments to see the archives of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was there to research the work of Muriel Cooper and Jacqueline Casey for the next Codex book I am editing while I was there to see what documents might exist about three projects that Dwiggins did for MIT: the design of a book on electrical engineering, the design of Technology Review magazine, and the design of second number of …
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19 May 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 16—A snowy visit to Boston, part I: A tiny surprise

In early February I made a trip to Boston and the surrounding area to attend a Society of Printers dinner and research two aspects of Dwiggins’ career: his work for paper companies and his work for Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was fortunate to make my visit in a lull between the relentless series of snowstorms that pummeled Boston this past winter.
Despite the mounds of snow piled everywhere the highways were clear enough to drive out to the suburbs to …
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13 March 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 14—Looking for Goddard (sp?)

Tracking down the ephemeral work of W.A. Dwiggins is a painstaking endeavor that often involves wrong turns and dead ends. An instance of this is my search for “Border, music title, Goddard Collection”, an April 9, 1907 entry in Dwiggins’ account books. The job was for D.B. Updike of The Merrymount Press which suggested the ultimate client was G. Schirmer, the large New York music publisher. For many years Schirmer, and its subsidiary Boston Music Co., commissioned The Merrymount Press …
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5 March 2015

The Definitive Dwiggins no. 13—Duo-Art

W.A. Dwiggins did a small number of jobs for music companies between 1917 and 1924. They were done via printing companies in Philadelphia (Franklin Printing) and Cleveland (The Caxton Company). Trying to find examples of the work has been extremely difficult as the references I have are partial and the material clearly ephemeral. But this morning I hit the jackpot. I found two 8-page booklets for the Duo-Art online that Dwiggins worked on: The World’s Supreme Artists and What Possession …
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