The Bell Gothic™ font family was originally commissioned by the
AT&T corporation for use in telephone books and other
applications. It was created by typographer Chauncey H. Griffith
in 1938 and was not available for general use until after 1978,
when AT&T adopted the Bell Centennial™ font family instead. Bell
Gothic History When the AT&T corporation commissioned Chauncey
H. Griffith to create the Bell font, they were looking for a
number of useful features for inclusion in the finished
typeface. Attractiveness was an important factor: so too the
ability to print the font at fairly high speed on thin paper
without loss of clarity. The font also had to be legible at very
small sizes, as it would be used in their telephone books. For
the same reason, Bell Gothic also had to be spatially
economical, given the constraints of the medium it was to be
published on. At the time of the font’s creation, Griffith was
heading the typographic development program at the Mergenthaler
Linotype Company. Earlier in his career