Adrian Wilson (book designer)

Adrian Wilson (1923 – 3 February 1988) was an influential book designer, and author of the classic 1967 work entitled The Design of Books.

Biography

Adrian Wilson was born in the United States of America in 1923, in Michigan. He spent only a brief period in college before joining the war resistance movement.

During World War II he was interned at Camp Angel, Waldport, where he printed William Everson's anti-war poems for Untide Press.

After the war he and his new wife, Joyce Lancaster Wilson, settled in San Francisco and helped to form the Interplayers Theater. In 1947 he studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, but soon left, first to join Jack Stauffacher at the Greenwood Press, and afterwards to join the University of California Press. After a few years he left the Press, but he accepted commissions from them for many years. In 1957 appeared his Printing for Theatre.

In 1958 he sold his press and he and his wife began a tour of Europe, where they met Will Carter, John Dreyfus, Hermann Zapf, Stanley Morison, Beatrice Warde and Giovanni Mardersteig. In 1983 he was an early recipient of a MacArthur Foundation award.

He developed an interest in early book illustration, leading to his The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1976), and (with his wife) A Medieval Mirror (1984), an account of early printed editions of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis.

Further reading

• Peter Rutledge Koch, "Three Philosophical Printers William Everson, Jack Stauffacher, and Adrian Wilson", in Parenthesis, 19 (2010 Autumn), pp. 12–17.

External links

• Douglas C. McGill, "Adrian Wilson, 64, A Printing Teacher and Book Designer", The New York Times, 6 February 1988.
• Guide to the Adrian Wilson Papers at The Bancroft Library