The Marber Grid

Romek Marber contributed to the Penguin Collectors’ Society as a designer. He is best known as the designer of the Crime grid in 1961 and later that grid was used for Fiction and Pelican. The Crime grid, as Romek explains, is really about giving illustrators the freedom to do their work.

Marber, an honorary graduate (Doctor of Letters) from the University of Brighton, was responsible for creating the grid that functioned as the general structure of all penguin classic crime books, and is an extremely acknowledged grid system. 

link: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/penguin-by-illustrators-romek-marber/

In this article Marber talks about his life opportunities and experiences. Growing up in a ghetto and concentration camps during the war and his productions for the Economist and how that contributed to his career for Penguin Books 

Marber's Timeline:

1925 – Born in Poland

1939 – Deported from his hometown in Western Poland and send to the Bochina Ghetto

1942 – Sergeant Kurzbach (the commander of the forced-labour worshop in Bochina) saves Marber from being sent to the Belzec death camp.

1945 – After spending the rest of the war in Bochina Ghetto and various concentration camps, Marber is liberated by the US Forces on the 28th of April

1946 – Returns to Britain, where he is reunited with his father and brother.

1950 – Enrols upon a course in Commercial Art at St. Martin’s School of Art

1953 – Attended the Royal Collage of Art

Late 1950s – Worked on a number of projects, most notably covers for The Economist, stating it “suited the boldness of [his] work…black with red is simple and dramatic”

1961 – Germano Facetti commissions Marber to design covers for Simeon Potter’s ‘Our Language’ and ‘Language in the Modern World’, after being impressed by his Economist covers.

1964-5 – Appointed as art director launching the Observer Magazine

1965 – Continued at the Observer as a design consultant

1989 – retires as a professor Emeritus from Middlesex University

2010 – published his memoires of his experiences during WWII titled ‘No Return’

2013 – The Minories, Colchester, exhibited a retrospective of Marber’s work. The exhibition then went on show at the University of Brighton and the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow