Books

Born in Austria in 1936, the second eldest of eleven siblings, Percy Mark grew up in a small village in the Austrian Alps before coming to England at the age of fourteen. Shortly after qualifying as an architect in 1959, he designed a cathedral for Monrovia in Liberia before spending eighteen months in Nigeria, completing his professional practice. He then spent six months with Dr Albert Schweitzer at his hospital in Lambarene, Gabon, in 1962 - 1963, where he met and got engaged to his life-long partner, Vreni Mark Burkhalter.
Back in the UK, as a partner of the architectural practice of Melvin Lansley and Mark during the 1970s and 80s, he engaged in private research into the application of the theory of harmonics in musical and visual proportions, leading to a period of lecturing on this subject in schools and universities in England and South Africa.
In 1995, he took over the chairmanship of the UK charity: Dr Schweitzer's Hospital Fund, visiting and supporting charitable projects managed in the spirit of Reverence for Life, both in India and Tanzania, as well as in the UK. He initiated the ‘Next Evolutionary Step' (NESt) project aimed at exploring the potential contribution the philosophy of Reverence for Life can make towards meeting the challenges of the global environmental crisis and began introducing this to schools in the UK.
In 2016, his son, James, succeeded Percy Mark as chairman of the charity, now called ‘Reverence for Life UK', allowing him to devote himself more fully, as part of the NESt Initiative, to the task of translating essential parts of Albert Schweitzer's third volume of his Philosophy of Civilisation. This resulted in 2020 in the publication, via NESt Publications, of two books under the titles The World View of Reverence for Life and My Path with Albert Schweitzer.
Conversations with his granddaughter, Emilie, inspired various small publications and essays, resulting in the current trilogy under the name of Lanya - Four Exploratory Journeys.