Germano Facetti: Germano Facetti, who has died in Italy aged 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).
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. 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 found a job as an art editor at Aldus Books, designing, commissioning and finding illustrations. Alongside his day job were many others.
Through friends he designed the Poetry Bookshop in Soho. 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.
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.
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 Agnes Varda among them.
Facetti's next move was to Penguin in London. 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 Penguin 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, an exasperated Facetti once seized a shelf of books between outstretched hands, hurled them past a questioning editor over the heads of cowering staff, and walked out.
In the late 1960s Facetti was consultant art editor to Purnell's History of the 20th Century. The historian 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.
Facetti's influence at Penguin was slowly undermined, and in 1972 he returned to Italy, where he worked in publishing and teaching. His main achievement was a 20-volume illustrated history of the Italian parliament. His archive is destined for the Museo della Resistenza in Turin. Each year 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. 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. His wife Mary and daughter Lucia survive him.
Germano Facetti: born, May 5th, 1928; died, April 8th, 2006