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Adrian Wilson (1923 – 1988)[1] was an American book designer and author of the influential 1967 work entitled The Design of Books.
Adrian Wilson was born on 1 July 1923 in Ann Arbor, Michigan and raised in Beverly, Massachusetts.[2][1] He briefly attended Wesleyan University.[2] He left college to join the war resistance movement, where he learned about book design and graphic design.[2] During World War II, he was interned at Camp Angel in Waldport, Oregon 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.[2]
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 yearshe left the Press accepted commissions from them for many years. In 1957, he published Printing for Theatre. One of his apprentices was printmaker Peter Rutledge Koch.[3]
In 1958, he sold his press and, along with 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.[4]
He died of congestive heart failure on 3 February 1988 in a hospital in San Francisco.[2]
