Titles for the seven stories
over 2 years ago
– Fri, Jul 29, 2022 at 11:50:51 PM
Now that the housekeeping and on-line programming details seem to be receding in the rear-view mirror, at long last I can turn my attention to writing about how Dwiggins imagined these stories and what he did to breathe life into them. And bring some of this to you in the form of updates.
Over the more than four decades that Dwiggins was working on his Athalinthia tales, the sequence of the stories varied, as did some of the names. (For example: Siriling > Sirriling > Sirraling >Syrillion.)
By the late 1940s he had settled on both the story order and the names, displaying those clearly on the cover of The War Against Waak (Püterschein-Hingham, 1948), so I have adopted that sequence for the 2022 edition.
My design calls for each of the seven stories to begin with a half-title page that has only the name of the story. Dwiggins drew/lettered line art for four of the stories; for a fifth, “Bronabejjia,” he made a combination of a line drawing and some typeset matter.
However, there was no art in the files for “Syrillion” and “Jade Carved Flamewise.” (In the Dwiggins Collection at Boston Public Library, each of the stories has its own folders that contain handwritten and typed manuscripts, plus tons of illustrations, relating to that individual story.)
I was disappointed not to have something directly from Dwiggins’s hand for each of the stories, but I refused to be deterred. Last winter, while I was working on the design, I decided to build my own titles for the two remaining stories, using original Dwiggins material to do so. For “Syrillion” I put together glyphs from the 41-point Plimpton Initials, which WAD made in 1936 for use at the Plimpton Press, where many Knopf novels were printed. For “Jade Carved Flamewise” I combined letters from a Dwiggins script alphabet that was included in Paul Hollister’s American Alphabets (Harper Brothers, 1930); given the particular combinations of letters in that word, the fit was not ideal, so I took a few liberties in retouching and combining the letters. (You can see these two titles at the bottom of the JPEG below.)
But then . . . Eureka! Yesterday, while working on the afterword text, I decided to go through everything I have in my Athalinthia files, and I came upon copy photographs of two title-page comps that Dwiggins made in the 1940s, on which he happened to have written both “Syrillion” and “Jade carved Flamewise” as titles. So now each of the stories can open with titles that Dwiggins actually made himself! These you’ll see in the upper portion of the JPEG.
Stay tuned . . . more to come as I keep working on this.