The W.A. Dwiggins Lecture

While the Society is a private organization, it has co-hosted the annual W.A. Dwiggins Lecture for almost five decades in partnership with the Trustees of the Boston Public Library.

With its intent to be of interest to students, and practitioners in the typographic, graphic design, and publishing communities in Boston, the list of speakers has been diverse. In more recent years, the Society has attempted to choose speakers that are of particular interest to students.

The Society is dedicated to this annual event and wishes to thank the BPL for its continued support.

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Past Speakers

2023 John G. Kristensen What Letterpress Printing has Taught Me about Life
2022 Alison Bechtel Text! Image! Action!
2021 Cancelled (due to covid)
2020 Steven Heller (via Zoom) The New Typography in America
2019 Rick Poynor David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian
2018 Douglass Scott Alvin Eisenman: Typographer, Teacher, Technologist
2017 Robert Bringhurst The Work of Hermann Zapf
2016 Bruce Kennett The Power of Mirth | WAD & the Serious Business of Fun
2015 Fred Smeijers From Small to Big, and Back Again
2014 Brenda Danilowitz The First Fifty Years of Josef Albers’ “Interaction of Color”
2013 Ben Fry Typography & Terabytes
2012 David Lemon Changing Traditions
2011 Luba Lukova Graphic Guts
2010 Khoi Vinh Ordering Disorder - KV on Interaction Design
2009 Matthew Carter & Jerry Kelly Hermann Zapf at 90
2008 Erik Spiekermann Working Type
2007 Sumner Stone The Essential Form
2006 Ellen R. Cohn Benjamin Franklin
2005 Milton Glaser Milton Glaser
2003 Chaz Maviyane-Davies Creative Defiance
2002 Joel Meyerowitz The Role of Photography and Social Consciousness: Creating the World Trade Center Archive
2001 Maira Kalman (un)Design
2000 Philip B. Meggs The S Word
1999 Anita Silvey Children’s Books and Their Creators: An Illustrated Overview
1998 Edward R. Tufte The Aesthetics of Information
1997 Peter Kindersley Better Ways to Communicate
1996 David Macaulay Taking the Shortcut
1995 Steven Heller Lucian Bernhard: The Master Who Couldn’t Draw Straight
1994 Sheila Levrant de Bretteville Q. What Is Worth Doing?
1993 Edward McDonald Jan Tschichold and W. A. Dwiggins: The Priest and the Tinker of Modern Typography
1992 Alvin Eisenman Ray Nash
1991 Sinclair Hitchings Dwiggins on Cornhill
1990 Douglass Scott Eclecticism to Modernism: American Graphic Design in the 1930s
1989 Matthew Carter & Carl Zahn Design of Type - Design with Type
1988 Dietmar R. Winkler A Quest for Quality, a Question of Integrity
1987 Oscar Handlin Freedom of the Press: The Social Foundations, 1760-1850
1986 Leonard Baskin The Intrusion of Expression in Anatomical Atlases: 1540-1850
1985 Gay Walker Achievement in Excellence: The Meriden Gravure Company and Harold Hugo
1984 Dorothy Abbe The Many-Faceted Dwiggins
1983 Alan Fern More Than Books: The Library of Congress in All Its Diversity
1982 Peter Davison One Hundred Twenty-five Years of the Atlantic
1981 Susan Otis Thompson The Gay Nineties and American Book Design
1980 David R. Godine The Life and Work of Rudolph Ruzicka
1979 Rollo G. Silver Daniel Berkeley Updike and the Merrymount Press
1978 Charles A. Rheault, Jr. The Riverside Press in Retrospect, 1852-1971
1977 Philip Hofer WAD as I Knew Him
1976 Alexander S. Lawson Frederic W. Goudy: A Glance into the Archives
1975 John E. Benson Two Hundred Seventy Years of Monumental Lettering
1974 Laurence B. Siegfried WAD: A Personal Recollection