Romek Marber was born into a Jewish family in Turek, Poland in 1925. During the Second World War he was detained in concentration camps at Płaszów, Auschwitz and Gliwice; after liberation, he migrated to England in 1946 to rejoin his father and brother. He studied at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art, London, becoming best known for cover designs for Penguin's iconic green-spined Crime series in the 1960s, and inventing the so-called Marber Grid, establishing geometric principles for modern book cover design.
Graphic designer Romek Marber was born into a Jewish family in Turek, Poland in 1925, one of the three children of Moshe Marber, a manager in a textile factory, and his wife, Bronka (née Szajniak), who worked with children’s charities. In 1939 the family tried to escape the German invasion of Poland by fleeing to Warsaw, where they were cut off by a siege of the city. Marber was sent to the Bochnia ghetto and in 1942 he managed to escape deportation to Bełżec death camp, assisted by Gerhard Kurzbach, a Wehrmacht officer who saved hundreds of Jews during the Second World War. His mother, grandparents, and twin sister all perished in the Holocaust. Although Marber managed to escape by forging documents and hiring a guide, he was eventually betrayed and caught by the Gestapo in Krakow. He was deported to Płaszów concentration camp, marched to Auschwitz and then to Gliwice in January 1945, before being transported on an open railway wagon to Germany. He was freed by US soldiers later the same year.
After the war, Marber travelled over the Alps into Italy, hoping to settling in Palestine, but after discovering that his father and brother were in England, he changed his plans, arriving in London in August 1946. He first worked in a clothing factory, where a dress designer encouraged him to take evening classes in drawing. After attending St Martin’s School of Art, he received a grant from the Committee for the Education of Poles in Great Britain to study painting at the Royal College of Art in 1953. After graduating in 1956, he was offered a job by the influential graphic designer Ashley Havinden (1903–1973) at Crawford’s Advertising Agency, but he decided against working in advertising and, instead, established his own practice, teaching and working part-time for Herbert Spencer, the designer and editor of Typographica, a journal dedicated to the visual arts and typography. In the late 1950s, Marber designed covers for The Economist before his talent was spotted by Italian designer Germano Facetti, then Penguin’s art director. After Marber designed covers for two Penguin books, Our Language and Language in Our World, he was commissioned to create covers for Penguin’s prestigious green-spined Crime series, whose notable roster of international authors included Georges Simenon, Dorothy L Sayers and Erle Stanley Gardner. Marber thus created the 'essential look of the new, more modern Penguins' and a 'landmark of independent British design' (The Eye, 2004), his new design featuring the sans-serif typeface 'Standard' in order not to depart too dramatically from the original 'Gill' font. In 1961, he invented the so-called Marber Grid in which the cover image occupies two-thirds of the available space, with the title section in the remaining upper third. The Marber Grid was so successful that it was applied to Penguin’s fiction range and later, to all Penguin paperbacks. Marber designed over 70 striking covers for Penguin, ranging from simple and graphic to more painterly, enjoying an extensive degree of creative freedom: Penguin gave him no briefs and most of his designs were accepted without further revisions. A review of Marber's work for Penguin Crime in The Eye in 2004 described how his 'classic covers functioned as an exemplary Modern identity, while embodying our conflicting urges towards order and chaos. Forty years later, they have lost not an iota of their power', while Marber himself viewed this work as 'trying to get across the excitement of what I had just read into a single image'. Marber was made artistic director of The Observer Magazine in 1964. He also designed for New Society, Town and Queen magazines, Nicholson’s London Guides, BBC Television, Columbia Pictures, London Planetarium and others. Marber was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Brighton and was head of graphic design at Hornsey School of Art; when it was incorporated into Middlesex University, he was designated Emeritus Professor. In 2004 his work featured in the exhibition Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties, held at the Barbican Centre, London, and a retrospective was held in 2013-14, touring to Brighton and Colchester. Throughout his career he worked from home: first in Notting Hill; then in a flat on the third and fourth floors of a Georgian house in Harley Street in London's West End; then in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, before moving to the countryside in Essex.
Romek Marber died in Braintree, Essex, England in 2020. Marber’s work is held UK public collections including in the Design Archive of the Victoria & Albert Museum, within a series relating to 30 Jewish émigré practitioners; a workshop celebrating their cultural contribution and the potential digitisation of these holdings was held at Blythe House, Olympia (former home to the V&A design archives) in May 2017. Examples of his book covers for Penguin Crime were featured in Ben Uri's exhibition Art Out of The Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain (2017). His childhood experiences are described in his memoir No Return: Journeys in the Holocaust (2010).
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Romek Marber]
Publications related to [Romek Marber] in the Ben Uri Library