Wolpe, Berthold
Entry updated 3 March 2025. Tagged: Artist.
(1905-1989) German book designer, typographer, illustrator and author, in UK from 1935 (interned 1939-1941; naturalized in 1947); his escape as a Jew from Nazi persecution was, as so often, a close call. In Germany from 1927, he had established an early reputation for his innovative use of lettering in various media; of the typefaces he invented, Albertus from 1935 is perhaps the most famous. Though he did freelance commissions, including logos for Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future, his career in the UK centred on his work for the publisher Faber and Faber from 1941 until his retirement in 1975, where he was primarily responsible for the Faber "look", as embodied by the more than 1500 covers he designed for the firm: hand-executed jackets with an emphasis on typographical effects, conveying a sense of assured but almost jaunty cultural gravitas. Much of this work was unsigned, but it may be assumed that a cover resembling his signed or BLW-initialled work would bear the touch of his own hand. His evocations of content and genre were almost unfailingly indirect, and in that sense he cannot be thought of as a significant creator of generic sf Illustrations as such; his importance for sf as a whole may lie primarily in the fact that he treated the sf texts he worked upon as being integrated into the visual conversation of UK literary life. Authors with entries in this encyclopedia with confirmed Wolpe covers include Brian Aldiss, Edmund Crispin, Lawrence Durrell, Stephen Gilbert, Neil M Gunn, Edwin Muir, Tom Stoppard and Charles Williams.
Wolpe was appointed OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 1959. [JC]
Berthold Ludwig Wolpe
born Offenbach am Main, Germany: 29 October 1905
died London: 5 July 1989
about the author
- Phil Cleaver. Berthold Wolpe: The Total Man (London: Impress, 2018) [graph: illus/hb/Berthold Wolpe]
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