New W. A. Dwiggins book! Athalinthia stories and pictures
Created by Bruce Kennett
The personal side of Dwiggins. Cool stories, published together for the first time. Tons of never-before-seen art, much in color.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Reprint of Dwiggins biography
4 months ago
– Thu, Aug 01, 2024 at 06:41:47 AM
Greetings,
First of all, thank you once again for helping to bring “Athalinthia” into print after nearly a hundred years. It could never have happened without your direct participation and support! I will be forever grateful to you, and I know WAD is up there smiling, now that his beloved Athalinthia tales are finally gathered together in one volume.
Next: Letterform Archive is reprinting my biography of Dwiggins. The first edition was printed and bound in New England (by the same people who made the “Athalinthia” book for us) in 2017, and publication was supported by backers in 44 countries. This time, the reprint edition is being manufactured overseas to a very high standard but at substantially lower cost. The content, reproduction quality, page and trim size identical to the first edition, but the price of the reprint has dropped to $50.
In case you, or anyone you know, might be interested in having a copy, here is the link to the Kickstarter campaign:
Birthday / Fireside Chat / Deluxe in Sheets for Hand Binding / Contact Info
over 1 year ago
– Fri, Jun 23, 2023 at 05:16:21 AM
Dwiggins’s birthday was on the 19th. We celebrated! Here’s a wonderful drawing he made for Strathmore Paper in 1918, inspired by the chinoiseries of Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728–1808). Accompanying text is set in WAD’s Electra type (first released by Linotype in 1935).
In case any of you might interested in watching it, the recording of my chat with Frank Romano at the Museum of Printing is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHZ4SZqkGDw
Gray Parrot returned to me a few copies of the deluxe, unbound. These are ideal for hand binders. The book interiors (sixteen 16-page signatures, printed on Mohawk Superfine) are folded and gathered but untrimmed. There are also endpapers, and the decorated papers that go over the front and rear boards, also printed on Superfine and untrimmed. [Nota bene: goatskin spine and spine stamping are not included.] If you or anyone you know is interested in buying a set, please be in touch.
Book interior, decorated paper for boards, endpapers, all printed on Superfine
Finally: I have looked at the message section of the Kickstarter campaign site almost every day for the past year, so that I could be quick to answer any questions from backers. At this point I’m no longer going to do that on a daily basis. From here on out, the best way to reach me is via my direct email which is bruce [then the usual symbol] brucekennett [then the dot, followed by] com.
Thanks once again for helping to get this book out into the world. There is so much we can accomplish if we work together!
Dwiggins . . . Rubylith . . . Steam Locomotives . . . Hot-Air Balloons . . .
over 1 year ago
– Fri, Jun 09, 2023 at 03:38:14 PM
My fireside chat with Frank Romano at the Museum of Printing last Saturday has just been posted on MoP’s YouTube channel, in case any of you might be interested in watching it. A little about Athalinthia, a lot about everything else!
Folding up the tent . . . last details . . . please read.
over 1 year ago
– Wed, May 17, 2023 at 08:45:53 AM
Greetings One and All,
At this point I’m taking care of the last details for Athalinthia.
1) First and most important, I will always be grateful to each of you for helping bring this book into the world. Thank you for your faith in me, and I hope you are pleased with the results.
2) I’d appreciate feedback from you, if you have any thoughts about how this campaign went. Was it helpful that I was frequently in touch as the project unfolded post-campaign? Did I issue too many updates? Too few? I am interested in hearing from you, to have that shape a future campaign or two, since I hope to do this again with several other book projects that I have in mind.
I have my own thoughts about this, mostly to do with rewards complexity. I’d always envisioned the poster as an integral part of the project, one poster accompanying every book sent out, since it could be printed “for free” on the same sheet with the book covers and endpapers. But then, just prior to launch, I discovered that including a poster would disqualify mailing the books as media mail — a key part of trying to keep shipping costs low – so it had to be offered as a separate item, with separate packing and shipping, and this reward was available only to US backers. This caused a lot of headaches in fulfillment. I would not do this again. Much better (in my view) to have fewer options, even though supposedly the “Kickstarter way” is to offer many options, I suppose to match the budgets of all backers. In future projects I think I would offer only one edition of a book, or perhaps standard and deluxe editions. And use BackerKit’s mailing services to lower shipping costs, rather than simply going to the post office and paying retail there. (The cost of mailing outside the US remains alarmingly high . . .)
Please give some thought to this, and tell me what could have made your experience better. Did anything annoy you? And of course, I’m always happy to hear about what went right.
3) Last fall and this winter, I mailed out standards, deluxes, and posters to all of you, but did not go into BackerKit to mark those individual orders as fulfilled. I just did a global marking on BackerKit of all orders as “shipped,” so it’s possible you will get some kind of notification from them. That’s just me, catching up on an administrative detail.
4) By now, T-shirts should have been delivered to all who ordered them. I received mine and they are gorgeous. Jim Jackson did an amazing job registering that complicated image in six separate print runs!
5) I have ten sets of the deluxe edition in sheets, in case any of you wish to buy a set, or know a hand-binder who might like one. I’ll post an update about this in a few days.
6) In case you know anyone in the Boston area who might be interested in attending this, I’ve been invited to have a fireside chat with Frank Romano at the Museum of Printing on the afternoon of Saturday, June 3rd. https://museumofprinting.org/news-and-events/
Many thanks,
Bruce
Dwiggins as storyteller, Tuesday evening
over 1 year ago
– Sun, Apr 23, 2023 at 11:56:49 AM
All of you in this little community already know about Athalinthia. But perhaps not about the puppets . . .
. . . Wait, what? . . . Puppets ?!?! . . .
Yes, this is another side of Dwiggins. He is admired in the world of puppetry for his work with the engineering and building of marionettes, and for his costume designs, set designs, lighting, props, and plays. His techniques are still a part of the curriculum at the Ballard Institute, University of Connecticut, which is considered to be THE place to go, worldwide, for the study of puppetry.
If you’d like to know more about this aspect of Dwiggins, join us on Tuesday evening when I give a presentation to Chicago’s Caxton Club. The first part will be about the book you helped to bring into the world, but the second part will be about marionettes.
It starts at 6:30 local time (7:30 PM New York time) on Tuesday. The Zoom presentation is free and open to anyone, but you need to register in advance. Q&A afterward. Hope to see you there!
