Emblems and Electra

What we have here is a bakers’ dozen of emblems drawn by W.A. Dwiggins and verses by William Rose Benét collected from various numbers of The Saturday Review of Literature issued in 1927 and 1928, all arranged with Electra, a then-new Linotype face from the hand of the said WAD and issued by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company of Brooklyn, New York, in 1935. The drawings were mailed to Mr. Benét from month to month and no word passed to him about the draughtsman’s notion except the lettered title under the design. His part of the game was to respond with a quatrain that should interpret the theme. According to Dwiggins, the author’s success as a mind-reader was astounding.