Chauncey Hawley Griffith was an American printer and type designer. He was born in Ironton, Ohio. Griffith became a printer’s apprentice at age sixteen. He first joined the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in 1906 as a traveling salesman. In 1915, he was made special assistant to Mergenthaler president Philip Tell Dodge and put in charge of type design and manufacture. He was appointed their Vice President of Typographic Development in 1936 – a position he held until his retirement in 1951. Griffith oversaw all production at Mergenthaler, totalling more than 1500 fonts during his tenure. His obituary in The Lusk Herald notes his role as art director for the newspaper’s typeface, Times Roman.The Lusk Herald, 1956.

Griffith is credited as designer of a number of typefaces, including Iconic No. 5 (1922–25), Excelsior (1931), Paragon (1935), Opticon (1935–36). The four of them comprised the bulk of Mergenthaler’s “Legibility Group” – a suite of typefaces intended for newspaper printing.Mergenthaler Linotype Company, 1935. The demands of coarse printing was a consistent theme throughout Griffith’s œvre, perhaps best exemplified in Bell Gothic (1938), designed for the special American Telephone and Telegraph Company for use in their telephone directories.

The University of Kentucky has cataloged a collection of silver gelatin photographic plates from Griffith’s estate, including seven portraits and eight pictures of his house and garden.University of Kentucky, n.d.