Typeface · Sans-serif

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.

About 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 as a proprietary typeface for use in telephone directories, and has since been made available for general licensing. Bell Gothic is designed for maximum legibility in the adverse conditions of small print on poor-quality newsprint paper, into which ink tends to absorb and spread out. It is therefore a popular font in printing at small sizes. AT&T replaced Bell Gothic with Matthew Carter's typeface Bell Centennial in 1978, the one-hundredth anniversary of AT&T's founding.

From the Wikipedia article “Bell Gothic”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Using Bell Gothic in a book

Sans-serif faces work well for headings, captions, children's books and modern nonfiction. For long-form body text in print, most designers still prefer a serif.

Commercial typefaces require a licence that covers embedding in PDFs and ebooks; check the foundry's licence before you publish.

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