Chauncey H. Griffith (1879–1956) was an American printer and typeface designer. Griffith was born in a small town near Ironton, Ohio, and began his career as a compositor and pressman in Lexington, Kentucky, where his family moved when he was ten years old. In 1906 he joined the

Mergenthaler Linotype Company The Mergenthaler Linotype Company is a corporation founded in the United States in 1886 to market the Linotype machine (), a system to cast metal type in lines (linecaster) invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. It became the world's leading manufacture ...

as part of their New Orleans sales force. In 1915, he transferred to the company's New York division, where he worked as assistant to the president and oversaw the entrenchment of Linotype equipment as the industry standard in newspaper and book composition. In 1936, he was elected the Vice President of Typographic Development. Griffith worked closely with the designers

William Addison Dwiggins William Addison Dwiggins (June 19, 1880 – December 25, 1956), was an American type designer, calligrapher, and book designer. He attained prominence as an illustrator and commercial artist, and he brought to the designing of type and books so ...

and Rudolph Ruzicka, whom he solicited to create typefaces for Mergenthaler. He developed the typeface Excelsior in 1931 and it was widely adopted as a text and display face for newspapers across the United States. While Griffith was head of typographic development, Linotype issued revivals of

Baskerville Baskerville is a serif typeface designed in the 1750s by John Baskerville (1706–1775) in Birmingham, England, and cut into metal by punchcutter John Handy. Baskerville is classified as a transitional typeface, intended as a refinement of what ...

Granjon Granjon is an old-style serif typeface designed by George W. Jones around 1924 for the British branch of the Linotype company, and based on the Garamond typeface that was used in a book printed by the Parisian Jean Poupy in 1592. The roman desi ...

, and

Janson Janson is the name given to a set of old-style serif typefaces from the Dutch Baroque period, and modern revivals from the twentieth century. Janson is a crisp, relatively high-contrast serif design, most popular for body text. Janson is based ...

. In 1938, Griffith designed the typeface

Bell Gothic Bell Gothic is a sans-serif typeface in the industrial or grotesque style designed by Chauncey H. Griffith in 1938 while heading the typographic development program at the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. The typeface was commissioned by AT&T ...

for the Bell Telephone Company's directories. Griffith's typeface designs include: *

Ionic No. 5 The Legibility Group is a series of serif typefaces created by the American Mergenthaler Linotype Company and intended for use in newspapers on Linotype's hot metal typesetting system. They were developed in-house by Linotype's design team, led ...

, 1922–1925 - part of Linotype's

Legibility Group The Legibility Group is a series of serif typefaces created by the American Mergenthaler Linotype Company and intended for use in newspapers on Linotype's hot metal typesetting system. They were developed in-house by Linotype's design team, led by ...

of newspaper faces, also including: :*Excelsior 1931 :*Paragon 1935 :*Opticon 1935–1936 *Poster Bodoni, Poster Bodoni Compressed, 1929 *

, 1930 * Memphis Extra Bold, Extra Bold Italic, 1936 * Bookman, 1936 *

, 1937 *

, 1938 * Ryerson Condensed, 1940 *

Corona Corona (from the Latin for 'crown') most commonly refers to: * Stellar corona, the outer atmosphere of the Sun or another star * Corona (beer), a Mexican beer * Corona, informal term for the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the COVID-19 di ...

, 1941 *Monticello, 1946

References

* Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. ''The Encyclopædia of Type Faces.'' Blandford Press Ltd.: 1953, 1983. . *Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. ''Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History.'' Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. . *Macmillan, Neil. ''An A–Z of Type Designers.'' Yale University Press: 2006. .

External links

Guide to the Chauncey Hawley Griffith papers
housed at the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center
Guide to the Chauncey Hawley Griffith photographs
housed at the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center
The Typophile page on Griffith
{{DEFAULTSORT:Griffith, Chauncey H. American typographers and type designers 1879 births 1956 deaths American printers