William Cheney was born in 1907 in Los Angeles to Harvey D. Cheney and Emma Patton Cheney, and attended Los Angeles High School and USC (though he dropped out before earning his degree). He married Elizabeth Schuler in 1929; they divorced in 1936. From 1929 to 1932, He worked as a shipping clerk for Dawson's Bookshop, and then went to work for printer Thomas Perry Stricker, under whose tutelage he learned to print. Cheney's first printed book was A Voyage to Trolland (1933). Cheney briefly owned his own press which he operated until he went to work in mechanical drafting for Douglas Aircraft from 1941 to 1946. In 1941, he married Elnora McClennan in 1941 (she died in 1979). From 1946 to 1947, Cheney worked for the Artesia News, and in 1948 he briefly worked for Muir and Watts, and for Saul and Lillian Marks' Plantin Press, before buying his own printing press and starting to print commercially. From 1962 to 1974, Cheney printed materials for the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and for Lawrence Clark Powell while working in the gatehouse on the Clark Library grounds. Cheney stopped most of his printing work in 1983, and died in 2002. He was a member of the Rounce and Coffin Club, a Los Angeles-area printing and bibliophilic club, and was at least acquainted with many of the other central figures in LA printing and bookish culture from the 1950s to the 1970s, including H. Richard Archer, Grant Dahlstrom, Jake Zeitlin, and Edwin Carpenter.

Sources:

-The natural history of a Los Angeles typesticker [oral history transcript] / William Murray Cheney, interviewee. 1982. Clark Library call no. Z232 C518 C5

- Ancestry.com census and vital records

- Newspapers.com obituaries