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Terra Foundation Essays series

Contributed by Love Lagerkvist on Jul 1st, 2017. Artwork published in .
Terra Foundation Essays series 1
Source: a-g-i.org James Goggin / AGI. License: All Rights Reserved.

From the Terra Foundation:

The Terra Foundation Essays series provides an international forum for the thorough and sustained exploration of fundamental ideas and concepts that have shaped American art and culture over time. Exploring and illuminating a selection of ideas that have been particularly salient within the production and consumption of art in the United States over three centuries, the Terra Foundation Essays present original research by an international roster of established and emerging scholars who consider American art in its multiple, trans-geographic contexts. The essays in each volume expand the conceptual and methodological terrain of scholarship on American art, offering comparative models and conceptual tools relevant to all scholars of art history and visual culture, as well as other disciplines within the humanities.

From Practise:

James Goggin and Shan James have provided design direction for the series (with an initial projected run of six volumes) as well as the design and typesetting of each volume. Each publication features a detailed, often deliberately enigmatic, pictorial crop on the cover, with titles and texts set exclusively in type designed by the American type designer, calligrapher, and book designer William Addison Dwiggins (1880–1956). Titles are derived from Dwiggins’s lettering for Paul Hollister’s American Alphabets (New York: Harper Brothers, 1930) [using Matthew Aaron Desmond’s digital font named Dwiggins Deco, see comments], while body text is set in Electra (1935–49), with headings and notes in Metro (1929–30).

Terra Foundation Essays series 2
Source: a-g-i.org James Goggin / AGI. License: All Rights Reserved.
Terra Foundation Essays series 3
Source: a-g-i.org James Goggin / AGI. License: All Rights Reserved.
Terra Foundation Essays series 4
Source: www.mullenbooks.com Mullen Books. License: All Rights Reserved.
Terra Foundation Essays series 5
Source: www.mullenbooks.com Mullen Books. License: All Rights Reserved.
Terra Foundation Essays series 6
Source: www.mullenbooks.com Mullen Books. License: All Rights Reserved.
Terra Foundation Essays series 7
Source: www.mullenbooks.com Mullen Books. License: All Rights Reserved.

Typefaces

  • Dwiggins Deco
  • Metro Nova
  • Electra

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3 Comments on “Terra Foundation Essays series”

  1. Chances are Practise didn’t use Dwiggins Deco, MADType’s digitization of the lettering by W.A. Dwiggins, but rather made their own interpretation.

    Here’s an image of the original book cover, courtesy of Letterform Archive:

  2. It is indeed Matthew Aaron Desmond’s Dwiggins Deco. I’d started digitising it myself, then found MAD’s perfectly adequate version.

  3. Thanks for chiming in and clarifying, James! All the better. It may seem like hairsplitting, but with our focus, it’s a crucial question whether something is (digital) lettering or fonts in use.

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