This is a guest post written by Christopher Marsden, V&A Senior Archivist (2003 – 22)
2025 is the centenary of Romek Marber’s birth and marks nearly 15 years since he first contacted me at the V&A with an invitation to visit him at home and look over his archive. During that first visit we enjoyed a wide-ranging and memorable conversation about his life and career while we examined a collection of his extensive and diverse work and his working records. I was both touched by what he told me of his arrival in Britain as a Jewish émigré after the War and fascinated by his account of design training in London in the 1950s and his early years as a freelance designer. When he generously offered to donate this collection for the V&A’s Archive of Art and Design (AAD) we were delighted to accept it.
My colleagues and I had no difficulty in making that decision: there was no doubt in our minds that Romek Marber deserved a place in the V&A. He was modest about his achievements, but through his work and through his teaching as head of department at Hornsey College of Art and Middlesex University, he became an influential and inspirational figure in the post-war graphic design profession. He influenced public sensibility, too, notably through his celebrated work for Penguin Books, for whom he created the distinctive ‘Marber Grid’ design template and illustrated in the region of 100 book covers for the Penguin ‘Crime’ and other series.
His early work for The Economist and as the founding art editor of the Observer colour supplement, initiating their cutting-edge, thought-provoking cover images and innovative artwork layouts, was also highly influential.
Romek’s moving personal autobiography, and his important place, with other Jewish émigrés, as a pioneer of modernist design in Britain, will ensure an enduring scholarly and public appetite to see his work and learn more about his life.
Curators elsewhere in the V&A seek to represent the widest possible range of international artists and designers by acquiring the best and most influential examples of their work. By contrast, the particular role of the AAD within the V&A is to document in depth the history of British applied art and design by collecting the personal papers and working records of artists and designers. For students and academics especially, these are an invaluable resource in research and teaching; they complement what is on display in the museum’s galleries and study rooms.
The artists and designers who create these archives are not always conscious of their value and when we begin a conversation with a living practitioner, or with the heirs of one who is no longer alive, we encounter varied attitudes to what is the significance, and what should be the scope, of an archive. We may be shown just a few precious objects and documents, or a studio or whole house filled with the evidence and output of a creative life. What we find may be beautifully and systematically arranged, or in a state of total, raw chaos.
In the case of Romek Marber, when I first visited him I saw an archive that was carefully selected and beautifully organised but quite small. Although such a distinguished figure in the profession, Romek was diffident and thought that the V&A might only be interested in a limited selection of his Penguin book covers and the best of his other work. However, with a little encouragement, he admitted that he had also kept quite a large quantity of drawings, notes and correspondence. With the dedicated support of his long-term partner, Orna Frommer-Dawson, herself a well-known graphic designer, and her colleague Geoff Windram, Romek located and assembled a much more substantial archive. On his death in 2020, they finished the work of identifying, sorting and cataloguing all this material and created romekmarber.com, an enduring online archive of his full body of work.
Romek’s estate generously passed to the V&A the physical archive, and this irreplaceable evidence of a rich creative life now forms one of the highlights of the AAD’s graphic design collections.
