Crime By Design – 1: The Marber Grid

This is the first in a series exploring the best design in crime and detective novels, starting with an absolute icon, the Marber Grid.

As an artist myself and being married to a graphic designer I am always drawn to a book by its cover, and classic crime is no exception. The green hue of the vintage penguin crime paperback always brings a joy to the heart. But one format in particular stands apart as being one of the most influential and beautiful layout designs of all time.

The Marber Grid and a Chestertonian example

The Marber grid was designed by Romek Marber in 1961, after Penguin Art Director Germano Facetti commissioned three designers to devise a new grid system to allow for illustrations alongside the bold typography associated with Penguin covers. Marber’s grid was chosen and he went on to illustrate around 70 titles for the Penguin Crime series. Marber retained the classic penguin green but significantly lightened the shade. The text was cropped at the top, which allowed for a broad section of two thirds of the cover to be used for illustration, something which hadn’t been done before across the Penguin brand.

The designs were provocative and eye catching and even a little unnerving to some, as Phil Banes writes in his book Penguin by Design: ‘The imagery used in the area below was often suggestive rather than literal, but even so, there was some adverse feedback about the ‘darkness’ of some of the images.’

These news covers, with striking imagery at an affordable cost brought high quality art and design into everyone’s home. These illustrations perfectly capture some element of the story or characters, as with one of my favourite designs, the covers for the Father Brown series, which show perfectly how Brown reaches his solutions through intuition and and meditative thinking, rather than through scientific or straight deduction. The design is so classic that in even more contemporary re-releases of Brown this same illustration concept has been retained.

The classic brown cover and a more modern retake

It was later decided that recurring series works should have a recognisable recurring image, as with the covers for Dorothy L Sayers releases, which contained a hand cut white figure placed somewhere on each design.

The Marber grid continued from here to influence every part of Penguins design output, as The Book Design Blog writes: ‘Facetti was so inspired by Marber’s design that he also used it for Penguin’s fiction range, and would later apply it again, practically unchanged, to the blue Pelican books. Eventually Marber’s layout became the standard layout for the entire range of Penguin paperbacks.’

Marber’s own story is a fascinating one. Born in Poland in 1925, he escaped the Nazi death camps with the help of Sergeant Kurzbach, who helped saved large numbers of Jew’s during WWII. Arriving in Britain in 1946 he enrolled at St Martin’s school of art (a member now of the UAL group of universities, where I also currently study), to study commercial art. He then went on to attend the Royal College of Art in 1953. Marber then designed a number of covers for the economist. These bold typographic designs were noticed by Germano Facetti who then asked him to work on some Penguin titles, which lead to the commission of the Marber Grid.

Marber is still alive and retired from the design world, holding a place as Professor Emeritus with Middlesex University. Designers today still look back to this iconic grid and its influence on cover design the world over. I think it’s also helpful in our current climate to think that a Polish immigrant to the UK who lived through Nazi occupation, changed the face of crime and book cover design the world over.