Adrian Wilson was an award- winning book designer, printer and the author of Printing for Theater (1957), The Design of Books (1967), and The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1976). He was born in 1923 in Michigan. During World War II Wilson served as a conscientious objector in Civilian Public Service camp no. 56 at Waldport, Oregon. At the camp he printed William Everson's anti-war poems for Untide Press. After the war he and his wife, Joyce Lancaster Wilson, moved to San Francisco and helped to form the Interplayers Theater. In 1947, he joined University of California, Berkeley to study architecture. However, he soon left UC Berkeley to join Jack Stauffacher at the Greenwood Press. Subsequently joined the University of California Press. In 1983, he received a MacArthur Foundation Award and Genius Grant.

The Interplayers was a San Francisco theatre founded in 1946 by a group of conscientious objectors who had met while working in the Civilian Public Service during WWII.