Robert Massin died in Paris on February 8, 2020, at the age of 94. This French graphic designer and typographer worked for major publishing houses including Gallimard. Little known to the general public, he had been studying in art schools for decades.
Born in 1925, in the Eure-et-Loir, Robert Massin trained after high school in typography alongside Pierre Faucheux, one of the founders of modern French graphic design at the Club Français du Livre.
He joined Gallimard in 1958 as artistic director and worked there for more than twenty years.
In particular, he signs the layouts of the books Style exercises (1963) and Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (1961) by Raymond Queneau or The Bald Singer by Eugene Ionesco (1964). These works are remarkable for the interplay between typography and text, Massin creating true typographic stagings.
Robert Massin also created graphic charters. In 1971, he designed the model of Gallimard's famous paperback books, the Folio collection. He chose the white background and called upon illustrators for each title.
In the 1980s, he became collection director at the Denoël publishing house, then worked for the Albin Michel, Robert Laffont and La Nuée bleue publishing houses
He is also the author of several works on typography, such as The ABCs of the trade (1989) of the Imprimerie Nationale or Azerty, the alphabet of the world e (2004) at Gallimard.
