On April 1 Romek Marber died at the great age of 94. He had a long and admired career in the graphic arts and his influence on the design culture at Penguin, starting in 1961, is incalculable.

Marber was born in Poland in 1925 and after surviving the War (just), arrived in Britain in 1946. He studied art at St Martins and the Royal College of Art in the early 1950s and, after a period as assistant to Herbert Spencer, editor of Typographica magazine, eventually established himself as a successful designer and illustrator in London. 

In 1961 Marber was invited by art director Germano Facetti to design two Penguin covers for the author Simeon Potter. His design for Language and the Modern Mind was a formalist composition with sans serif type and geometric elements combined with an abstracted portrait in printers dots.      

In 1962 Penguin decided to try again with visual covers, to replace the dated typographic covers of the 1950s. Facetti invited three designers to propose a grid to give structure to the cover designs and Marber’s plan won with this explanatory design. You can see my analysis of the grid here.

The Marber Grid, as it is called, was tested on a series of crime novels with Marber himself commissioned to supply the illustrations for twenty titles. Having already booked an overseas holiday with his wife he had only a few weeks to complete the job. The assignment came in June and publication – printed books on bookshop shelves – was in October, an extremely close publishing date. Apart from reading the books to get an understanding of their content, Marber needed to build a streamlined studio process to get the work done. This involved drawings, collages, photography and re-photography and other processes. He always worked from home …

“… a table to work on; pencil and pens and brushes…I used a camera in my work, and an enlarger, but I didn’t have a darkroom. I used to wait until it got dark and the kitchen wasn’t in use, quite late at night. I had a screen to cover the window …What I very often found was that clients who came the first time quite liked the slightly primitive way that I worked. It was a surprise to them.”  (Eye magazine interview)

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The result of those few weeks was a body of work that has survived the intervening 60 years as a case study in the application of modernist design principles. Marber had achieved a synthesis of creative artwork, much of it with a Surrealist flavour, and Swiss Typographic ideas in the text design and layout, in a branding exercise that preserved Penguin’s design heritage in an updated form.Those first twenty titles proved a success, increasing sales by a significant margin. Soon the Marber grid was applied across the whole Crime series, and soon after to Fiction, Modern Classics, Pelican and other Penguin imprints. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Marber’s layout gave much of the vast Penguin range its brand image.  

Marber was a freelance designer. He designed covers for The Economist, New Society and other magazines and produced corporate work for many clients. But that is another story.

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In 1998, Penguin awoke from decades of slumber to regain its reputation for good cover design. One of its first projects was a series of modern classics packaged as Penguin Essentials, under the General Art Director John Hamilton. 

According to designer Phil Baines “Hamilton commissioned leading illustrators and design groups to produce all-over designs. There is no obvious unity to these covers except the boldness of their execution, and the use of prominent designers and illustrators helped to achieve that goal.”

I remember discovering these new books when they first appeared and thinking, at last Penguin is back. Now with two decades of hindsight, you can see the strong influence of Grunge aesthetics and of David Carson on particular. The scratched, rubbed and blurred fragmentation of Grunge was all the rage in the 1990s, with designers like Carson in the US and Vaughn Oliver in the UK becoming stars of the design world. 

The Penguin Essentials series was aimed at a young market, “new buyers whose disposable income was being spent on music and clothing.” The designers Hamilton invited, including Banksy and Tomato, were not book cover designers as such, so the series avoided the trade look that Penguin as a brand has slumped into. It worked, the series was successful and helped set up the company for a new era of leadership in style, exemplified by the arrival of David Pearson and others in the coming years.

The Penguin Essentials series is still running on a much expanded list but still with its vibrant contemporary cover designs by innovative designers. 

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                 Cover designers: Junky by Chris Ashworth + A. Sissons / Riddle of the Sands by Paul Cohen / A Clockwork Orange by Dirk van Dooren / 1984 photographs by Darren Haggar and Dominic Bridges / Ballad of the Sad Café photographs by Scott Wishart.  

   .. .         Cover designs by Martin Bassett, 1973, and Germano Facetti, 1972

Hard Edge Abstraction was a movement of international contemporary art that developed during the 1960s. It typically involved large geometric forms in flat colours.

Putting it on Pelican covers was part of a tendency at the publisher from the late 1960s towards abstract cover designs. It branded the book as contemporary and stylish and must have adapted well to face-forward bookshop display.

//….        These two covers from 1976 and 1978 are by Eugenio Carmi, a renowned Italian artist whose style in the 1970s had swung around to this form of cool geometric abstraction. The images below are paintings from that period.

…….    Eugenio Carmi : Counterspace, Counterimage 40, both 1974

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