Chauncey H. Griffith

Specimens of typefaces by Chauncey H. Griffith

Chauncey H. Griffith (1879–1956), American printer and typeface designer. Griffith was born in the U.S. state of Ohio, and began his career as a compositor and pressman. In 1906 he joined the Mergenthaler Linotype Company as part of their sales force. He became sales manager, and oversaw the entrenchment of Linotype equipment as the industry standard in newspaper and book composition.

Griffith advanced to become a vice president for typographic design, working closely with the typeface designers William Addison Dwiggins and Rudolph Ruzicka. 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, Granjon, and Janson. In 1938 Griffith designed the typeface Bell Gothic for the Bell Telephone Company's directories.

Griffith's typeface designs include:

• Ionic No. 5, 1922–1925
• Poster Bodoni, Poster Bodoni Compressed, 1929
• Granjon, 1930
• Excelsior, 1931
• Paragon, 1935
• Bookman, 1936
• Opticon, 1935–1936
• Memphis Extra Bold, Extra Bold Italic, 1936
• Janson, 1937
• Bell Gothic, 1938
• Ryerson Condensed, 1940
• Corona, 1941
• Monticello, 1946

References

• Jaspert, W. Pincus, W. Turner Berry and A.F. Johnson. The Encyclopædia of Type Faces. Blandford Press Ltd.: 1953, 1983. ISBN 0-7137-1347-X.
• Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. ISBN 1-57912-023-7.
• Macmillan, Neil. An A–Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press: 2006. ISBN 0-300-11151-7.

External links

• Linotype's web page on Griffith
• The Typophile page on Griffith