Carin Goldberg, a "celebrated graphic designer who brought an inventive postmodern sensibility to book and album covers," died January 19, the New York Times reported. She was 69. Goldberg, who trained as a painter, "was a scholar of designs and typefaces, particularly those of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which she reimagined in elegant and witty combinations on the covers of hundreds of albums and thousands of books."
She designed covers for bestsellers such as Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and "for more esoteric fare, like Rilke's The Sonnets to Orpheus, for which she channeled the vintage typography of the Viennese decorative arts movement Wiener Werkstätte," the Times noted.
Goldberg came of age as a designer for CBS Records in the late 1970s, "when the field of graphic design was dominated by a kind of corporate modernism," the Times wrote. She and others began looking to the past for inspiration. Her cohort included Paula Scher, who was for a time her boss at CBS; Lorraine Louie, who was putting her stamp at Vintage Books on covers for young authors like Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City); and Louise Fili, then the art director of Pantheon Books and creator of the sultry cover for The Lover by Marguerite Duras (1985).
One of Goldberg's most recognizable works was her cover for Vintage's 1986 reissue of James Joyce's Ulysses. "Her brief, as she often recalled, had been to riff on a 1949 edition of the book by the designer E. McKnight Kauffer, in which he had enlarged the 'U' and flanked it with a slender 'l.' Her version set the title at an angle and rendered it in vivid colors--a flourish that paid homage to an even earlier work, a 1920s poster by the German designer Paul Renner showcasing the modernist sans serif typeface he called Futura," the Times wrote.
"I rationalized that Joyce was a modernist," Goldberg said in an interview with the graphic designer Sean Adams. "That was my hook."
She left CBS in 1982 to start her own business, creating designs for books, records, posters and media companies. "Carin's work was stylish and smart and formally inventive," said author and book designer Peter Mendelsund, now the creative director of the Atlantic magazine. "She was also formally restless. Every single great book cover she made was different from the rest."