Public Events
While the Society is private, for 39 seasons in conjunction with the Boston Public Library, it has co-hosted the very public W.A. Dwiggins Lecture.
With its intent to be of interest to “bookish” people in Boston's design, and publishing communities, the list of speakers is impressive. In more recent years, the Society has attempted to choose speakers that are of particular interest to students.
The Society is pleased and dedicated to this important event and thanks the BPL for its continued support.
Past Speakers
| January 15, 1974 | Laurence B. Siegfried | WAD: A Personal Recollection |
| January 14, 1975 | John E. Benson | Two Hundred Seventy Years of Monumental Lettering |
| January 14, 1976 | Alexander S. Lawson | Frederic W. Goudy: A Glance into the Archives |
| January 19, 1977 | Philip Hofer | WAD as I Knew Him |
| January 18, 1978 | Charles A. Rheault, Jr. | The Riverside Press in Retrospect, 1852-1971 |
| January 17, 1979 | Rollo G. Silver | Daniel Berkeley Updike and the Merrymount Press |
| January 17, 1980 | David R. Godine | The Life and Work of Rudolph Ruzicka |
| January 15, 1981 | Susan Otis Thompson | The Gay Nineties and American Book Design |
| January 21, 1982 | Peter Davison | One Hundred Twenty-five Years of the Atlantic |
| January 18, 1983 | Alan Fern | More Than Books: The Library of Congress in All Its Diversity |
| January 19, 1984 | Dorothy Abbe | The Many-Faceted Dwiggins |
| January 17, 1985 | Gay Walker | Achievement in Excellence: The Meriden Gravure Company and Harold Hugo |
| January 16, 1986 | Leonard Baskin | The Intrusion of Expression in Anatomical Atlases: 1540-1850 |
| January 15, 1987 | Oscar Handlin | Freedom of the Press: The Social Foundations, 1760-1850 |
| January 21, 1988 | Dietmar R. Winkler | A Quest for Quality, a Question of Integrity |
| January 12, 1989 | Matthew Carter and Carl Zahn | Design of Type - Design with Type |
| January 18, 1990 | Douglass Scott | Eclecticism to Modernism: American Graphic Design in the 1930s |
| January 17, 1991 | Sinclair Hitchings | Dwiggins on Cornhill |
| January 16, 1992 | Alvin Eisenman | Ray Nash |
| January 21, 1993 | Edward McDonald | Jan Tschichold and W. A. Dwiggins: The Priest and the Tinker of Modern Typography |
| January 19, 1994 | Sheila Levrant de Bretteville | Q. What Is Worth Doing? |
| January 19, 1995 | Steven Heller | Lucian Bernhard: The Master Who Couldn't Draw Straight |
| January 18, 1996 | David Macaulay | Taking the Shortcut |
| January 16, 1997 | Peter Kindersley | Better Ways to Communicate |
| January 22, 1998 | Edward R. Tufte | The Aesthetics of Information |
| January 14, 1999 | Anita Silvey | Children's Books and Their Creators: An Illustrated Overview |
| March 1, 2000 | Philip B. Meggs | The S Word |
| November 13, 2001 | Maira Kalman | (un)Design |
| November 13, 2002 | Joel Meyerowitz | The Role of Photography and Social Consciousness: Creating the World Trade Center Archive |
| November 20, 2003 | Chaz Maviyane-Davies | Creative Defiance |
| April 27, 2005 | Milton Glaser | Design and Ambiguity |
| April 6, 2006 | Ellen R. Cohn | Benjamin Franklin |
| April 4, 2007 | Sumner Stone | The Essential Form |
| April 9, 2008 | Erik Spiekermann | Working Type |
| April 21, 2009 | Matthew Carter and Jerry Kelly | Hermann Zapf at 90 |
| April 14, 2010 | Khoi Vinh | Ordering Disorder - KV on Interaction Design |
| April 14, 2011 | Luba Lukova | Graphic Guts |
| April 18, 2012 | David Lemon | Changing Traditions |
| April 3, 2013 | Ben Fry | Typography & Terabytes |