Romek Marber designed scores of startling Penguin and Pelican books for the U.K. publishing house during the 1960s and 1970s. The high contrast crime genre covers he created are emblems of the era yet timeless too – minimal, modern and expressive.
Recently, thanks to Rick Poynor, I learned he survived the Holocaust as an inmate in the Plaszow forced labor concentration camp, the same Polish lager that was featured in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.
Poynor generously gave me Marber’s memoir of that time, published by Five Leaves Publications and edited by design historian Richard Hollis. I’ve been totally absorbed. If you read enough survivor literature the stories have a cruel sameness, but the manner in which Marber recalls the sadness of losing his twin sister and mother to Belzec death camp, is both chilling and compelling.
Read more about Marber in Poynor’s blog here and here. And here is an essay about his work in EYE.
(Read Saturday’s Daily Heller about the Beatles’ “Butcher cover.”)
