Gerald Cinamon

Chief designer for Penguin Books with a flair for pacing illustrated nonfiction, such as with Pelican’s Style and Civilization series

Gerald Cinamon, who has died aged 93, was one of the most skilled book designers of his generation. For 20 years from 1965 he was Penguin Books’ main designer of arts and architecture titles, becoming its chief designer in the mid-1970s.

A master of the paste-up method of layout, Cinamon was particularly adept at pacing illustrated books. From one spread to the next he would shift visual emphasis from vertical to horizontal, wide-angle to close-up, empty to full, synchronising these switches of treatment with key points in the text.

His debut for Penguin in 1961 coincided with two key events for the company: its acquittal in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, and its employment of Germano Facetti, who recharged its cover designs for a new decade. But it was Kaye Webb, new editor at the Puffin imprint, who instigated the body of work for which Cinamon would become best known.

Webb had compiled a volume of her husband Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s cartoons, and handed Cinamon, then a freelancer, “a box of jumbled clippings” from which to create a Penguin edition. He would paste up layouts at his kitchen table in Notting Hill, west London, surrounded by manuscripts, proofs and the aroma of Cow Gum, downing tools when his daughters returned from school.

The St Trinian’s Story (1961) led to further commissions for illustrated Penguins, and Cinamon unintentionally became a specialist in this field, at a time when letterpress was rapidly being replaced by offset litho as the means of printing books.

Where type and images had previously occupied two discrete planes – pictures on their own pages, often on coated art paper – litho enabled designers to place picture and text side-by-side, and Cinamon took advantage of this, interweaving halftones and line images with set type to make a verbal–visual narrative. His flair for sequencing nonfiction books led him to become the main designer of Pelican series of the 60s and 70s such as Style and Civilization and The Architect and Society.

The integrated method was also crucial to John Berger’s Success and Failure of Picasso (1965). There the author indicated precise points within the text where images were to be placed. When Cinamon inevitably found that this was not always possible, Penguin dispatched him to Geneva to resolve the layout with Berger.

In 1966 Penguin launched a hardback imprint, for which Cinamon designed A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, written by Berger and with photographs by Jean Mohr. The contrast between these two books for Berger demonstrates the span of Cinamon’s repertoire, despite the contextual similarities (same author, same publisher, single-colour print, a hand-held format).

Where Success and Failure’s layout rolled line by line with Berger’s polemic, A Fortunate Man’s images did not correlate with points in the text, and this allowed Cinamon to “write” the text–photo combinations, and the overall rhythm, in his own way. His arrangement is particularly effective in contrasting man with his rural environment: 45 pages pass before a human figure appears in the photographs.

Though sometimes categorised as a proponent of the objective, modernist Swiss style of graphic design, Cinamon’s solutions to briefs were far broader than that tag implies. His colleague Tony Kitzinger remembers his outlook as being “Swiss, tempered by New England”.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Jerry was the younger son of Pearl (nee Hirschberg) and Max, a liquor salesman. He initially studied at Massachusetts School of Art, and in 1953 joined the US Navy. He was then accepted by the department of graphic arts at Yale University, where his teachers included Alvin Eisenman, Armin Hofmann, Norman Ives, Josef Albers, Herbert Matter and Paul Rand.

Graduating in 1957, Cinamon received a Fulbright scholarship for the Ecole des Arts et Métiers in Paris, but found the approach there outmoded, so drove to Switzerland to study further with Hofmann in Basel. He was thus influenced first-hand by several key strands of the modern movement, from the Bauhaus to the new American advertising.

On the way home from Europe he met Diana Philcox, a recent textiles graduate from the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. In New York Cinamon freelanced for publishers, and took up a one-year contract at Standard Oil of New Jersey (subsequently Exxon). In 1959 he and Philcox married, and in the following year moved with their twin baby daughters to Britain. Cinamon’s first clients in London included New Left Books and the Jewish-interest publisher Soncino.

After more than 20 years with Penguin, he left in 1985 to form a partnership with Kitzinger, who said of his former partner: “When I think of Jerry I do not see the kind of designer who shuffles little bits of paper around on a sheet. He would know, in advance, what he was realising.”

In 1987 Cinamon guest-edited a special issue of the trade journal Monotype Recorder in memory of Hans Schmoller, the exacting production director at Penguin (1949-76), who had been a “father figure” to him. He also wrote on the work of artist-designers including Talwin Morris, Ben Shahn and Emil Rudolf Weiß.

His biography of the type designer Rudolf Koch (2000), includes an apparently stray anecdote about a “young Berliner” who in 1933 had applied to become one of Koch’s students but had been turned away. The young Berliner was Schmoller.

Cinamon’s third daughter, Hannah, died in 2023. He is survived by Diana, their daughters Sara, Kate and Beth, eight grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.

🔔 Gerald Earl Cinamon, graphic designer and author, born 27 July 1930; died 15 February 2024