Hans Schmoller

Hans Peter Schmoller (9 April 1916 – 25 September 1985) was a German and British graphic designer who worked as Head of Typography and Design at Penguin Books from 1949 to 1976.

During his Penguin years he played a crucial role in postwar British typography, and has been described as one of the most influential typographers of the last century.

His father, Hans, was a paediatrician and his mother Marie owned a small business making and selling folded paper lampshades.

He excelled in athletics as a child and in 1933 attempted to study art history at university, but was prohibited owing to his Jewish descent.

Instead he applied to become a student of Rudolf Koch but Koch insisted on Hans receiving prior craft training.

In 1933 Schmoller began a four year apprenticeship as a compositor in the Jewish book-printing firm of Siegfried Scholem.

He studied fine typography during the day at the Staatliche Kunstbibliothek and in evenings with Johannes Boehland at the Höhere Graphische Fachschule.

As the situation in Germany worsened for Jews, Schmoller made efforts to move abroad.

He received a letter from the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society in Basutoland (now Lesotho) to take a temporary job as manager of the missionary press.

Schmoller was interned in South Africa as an enemy alien from July 1940 to April 1942 and became a British citizen in 1946.

In December he returned to Berlin where he saw his parents for the last time, who were transported in October 1942.

His father died of a heart attack in the Theresienstadt Ghetto soon after arrival, and his mother was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.

In 1949 he replaced Jan Tschichold as Typographer at Penguin Books.

‘Hans Schmoller was one of the last species of typographers with a profound background of the history of types and with an eye nobody could fool.’ - Hermann Zapf

He married Tanya Schmoller in 1950.