Germano Facetti;(AMAZING) book designer/death camp survivor
Hyfler/Rosner
A Nazi death camp survivor, he changed the design of Penguin
books and made images tell stories
Richard Hollis
Tuesday April 11, 2006
The Guardian
Germano Facetti, who has died in Italy at the age of 77, led
several professional lives. For 25 years he was a big
presence in British publishing and design, best known as the
art director who changed the face of Penguin Books in the
1960s. Few of his colleagues were aware of his contributions
to the progressive theatre and cinema in London and Paris.
Nor was it known that his concern with the significance of
documentary images originated in his experience of a Nazi
slave labour camp.
Facetti was born in Milan. Still a teenager, in 1943 he was
arrested by the Germans as an armed member of the
resistance, and deported to Mauthausen in Austria. Prisoners
were worked to death, killed at the rate of 150 a day -
beaten, shot, starved, some gassed. Facetti followed a
comrade's advice: "Learn German, never look your enemy in
the eye, and never bend your shoulders" (which would expose
them more to the cold - sometimes minus 20 degrees). When
the Americans liberated the camp, Facetti collected personal
photographs discarded by his tormentors, and documents and
plans of the camp. These he kept with his own drawings,
bound together with fragments of his striped camp uniform,
in a small box that had held photographic paper.
This gave the title to a short film made by Anthony West,
The Yellow Box: A Short History of Hate, in which Facetti,
talking to three inquisitive students and backed by images
from his archive, gives death in the camp, and his life
there, a historical context.
After the war, Facetti went south to Milan, working first
with communist groups to re-establish schools. He joined the
important architectural practice of Belgiojoso, Peressutti
and Rogers (BBPR), looking after their technical literature
and records. Ernesto Rogers (uncle of Richard Rogers) edited
the magazine Domus, where his postwar programme was "to
educate in aesthetic judgment, in technical skills and
ethical attitudes, all three directed to the same purpose -
building a society". These were the values that Facetti
brought with him from Milan.
At BBPR he had met the English architect Mary Crittall. They
married and left for England in 1950. While Facetti did odd
jobs on London building sites he was also designing. In the
spirit of the Bauhaus, he was non-specialist: his first
published works were a chair, and a pair of sandals. He
produced an exhibition of industrial design for the Italian
Institute.
With the Italian Institute posters, Facetti became a graphic
designer - the profession existed then as "commercial art".
He joined the anarchic typography evening class at the
Central School of Arts and Crafts where his skills as a
locksmith were useful in freeing forbidden equipment. He
found a job as an art editor at Aldus Books, designing,
commissioning and finding illustrations. Alongside his day
job were many others. Aldus was based in Fitzrovia, but
Facetti's social life centred on the Cafe Torino in Old
Compton Street, the hangout of London's avant garde.
Through friends he designed the Poetry Bookshop in Soho, a
stage set for Lindsay Anderson at the Royal Court, and took
part in the This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel
Gallery in 1956. He taught part time in art schools,
crouching to meet seated students at eye level and
addressing them as "cheeldrens" - after 25 years he spoke
with a powerful Italian intonation, and could swear only in
a grotesquely comic English. He enjoyed giving a commentary
to friends on a bus, until passengers interrupted, as he
identified St George's Hospital as the National Gallery, St
James's Street clubs as different departments of Scotland
Yard, and so on.
Other habits were unusually exotic - eating coffee beans by
the handful from the glove compartment of his car, for
example. And his appearance was striking: in the catalogue
for This is Tomorrow he appears fur-jacketed in the guise of
Mayakovsky. A few years later, impeccably suited, he looks
out from French pharmaceutical advertisements.
In 1959 Facetti left London for Paris to work on the
point-of-sale material in shops selling Pingouin wools. But
Facetti's preoccupation was with images. In Aldus books, he
said, "the flow of images, captions and diagrams was planned
like a documentary film".
At the time, still photographs manipulated by a rostrum
camera were a mainstay of documentary films. Whereas in
London, Facetti's friendships had been with artists and
architects, in France his friendships were with film
makers - Alain Resnais and Agnčs Varda among them. He worked
with Chris Marker, assembling still images and appearing in
his film La Jetée (1962).
Facetti's next move was from Pingouin in Paris to Penguin in
London. In England, Penguin Books could no longer rely on
their reputation: their colour-banded typographic covers,
however recognisable, were dowdy competition for the new
paperback publishers' colour illustrations. Penguin founder
Allen Lane had been impressed with the Poetry Bookshop:
Facetti's experience in European retailing, and in
industrial and interior design as well as publishing, would
be useful. Facetti, a huge reader in several languages,
admired Penguins as an embodiment of English culture.
In 1960, Lane hired Facetti to bring Penguin covers up to
date. Facetti introduced young designers and, beginning with
the crime series in 1962, slowly remade Penguin's identity.
Many of the covers he designed himself, aiming to provide "a
visual frame of reference to the work of literature as an
additional service to the reader". He had helpful and
committed editors, an astonishing visual memory, and he
could rely on an archival system - before computers - to
locate the precisely apt image in an improbable, distant
source.
His greatest success was his redesign of Penguin Classics
with a black background. Faced with the directors' hostility
to his proposal, Facetti filled a window of Blackwell's
bookshop in Oxford, staked a magnum of champagne on the
sales figures for the next week, and won. To achieve
consistency over the other series - Modern Classics, Penguin
English Library, and Pelican Books - he fought long battles
with conservative-minded colleagues. In a discussion about
the spines of books in a Penguin office I witnessed an
exasperated Facetti seize a shelf of books between
outstretched hands, hurl them past a questioning editor over
the heads of cowering staff, and walk out.
In the late 1960s Facetti was consultant art editor to
Purnell's History of the Twentieth Century, the most
ambitious of the new weekly "part works". AJP Taylor, a
leading contributor, said that, rather than the conventional
text of history books, "It is easier to reach the mind and
imagination of the reader with graphics." Charts, diagrams
and maps were produced by Facetti's team, and picture
researchers around the world quarried period magazines and
the catalogues of remote art galleries.
He helped establish the Design and Art Directors Association
in London in 1963 and designed its first exhibition. With
Alan Fletcher he was co-author of Identity Kits, an
illustrated account of non-verbal communication. In 1970 he
produced Victoria Etcetera, a film on the imperial statuary
of London buildings using photographs by Paul Gori. For a
time he was President of the Alliance Graphique
Internationale and served on advisory panels for design
education.
Facetti's influence at Penguin was slowly undermined, and in
1972 he returned to Italy, where he worked in publishing and
teaching. He designed regional travel guides for L'Espresso
and his main achievement was a 20-volume illustrated history
of the Italian parliament. The archive from his home in
Italy is destined for the Museo della Resistenza in Turin.
Each year, as senior critic in graphic design, he visited
Yale, where his subject was, inevitably, the use of images
for the "construction of a sequence of understanding which
leads beyond the text".
Facetti designed hundreds of books and magazines. They
remain exemplary demonstrations of the way in which diagrams
and documentary images can be used to make ideas more
understandable, and history more real.
He is survived by his wife Mary and daughter Lucia.
· Germano Facetti, designer, writer and teacher, born May 5
1928; died April 8 2006
Charlene
Hyfler/Rosner wrote:
> With the Italian Institute posters, Facetti became a graphic
> designer - the profession existed then as "commercial art".
> He joined the anarchic typography evening class at the
> Central School of Arts and Crafts where his skills as a
> locksmith were useful in freeing forbidden equipment. He
> found a job as an art editor at Aldus Books, designing,
> commissioning and finding illustrations. Alongside his day
> job were many others. Aldus was based in Fitzrovia, but
> Facetti's social life centred on the Cafe Torino in Old
> Compton Street, the hangout of London's avant garde.
Anarchic typography?
wd42
Hyfler/Rosner
> Germano Facetti
>
> A Nazi death camp survivor, he changed the design of
> Penguin books and made images tell stories
I recently picked up "Penguin by Design" a gorgeous book
about the history of Penguin book design, and there are,
obviously, lots of references to Facetti's work. When I
started collecting books as a teenager in the sixties, his
beautiful and elegant Penguin Modern Classics were exactly
the editions I bought and still own. Got a 1968 Penguin of
Camus' The Plague? That's him. Abram Games is another
great designer from that period. In fact, Penguin had a
whole bunch of fantastic designers.
http://www.designmuseum.org/design/index.php?id=101
http://www.aiap.it/asso/galleria/facetti/facetti1.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4558711.stm
Brigid Nelson
wrote:
>
>At the time, still photographs manipulated by a rostrum
>camera were a mainstay of documentary films. Whereas in
>London, Facetti's friendships had been with artists and
>architects, in France his friendships were with film
>makers - Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda among them. He worked
>with Chris Marker, assembling still images and appearing in
>his film La Jetée (1962).
>
Wow, he was in one of my favorite films. A little digging around at
amazon finds that La Jetee is available on DVD! It's featured on this
collection of short films:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Y21F211FC
I'm going to look for this at my local independent video store, The
last VHS copy of this I saw looked so bad there was no point in even
watching it.
brigid