When Hans Schmoller first saw a copy of John Berger's Ways of Seeing - the book was published in 1972 - he hurled it across the room. Schmoller, who had succeeded Jan Tschichold as designer at Penguin in 1949, was a subtle practitioner of traditional book design. His pages were balanced, proper and elegant. He hated the pages of black sans serif type, punctuated with illustrations, which Richard Hollis - working with Berger and others - had produced.

LRB 2 June 2005 | PDF Download