Carin Goldberg's variations on book design

Graphis, Nov/Dec 2001 by Lupton, Ellen

Carin Goldberg's Variations on Book Design

By Ellen Lupton Illustration by Hanoch Piven

The remarkable career of Carin Goldberg reflects one woman's ability to tap into her cultural moment and create a series of icons that have functioned in the brutal arena of retail sales while also engaging-- head-on-the cultural debates internal to the design profession. Known primarily for her book covers and jackets, Goldberg helped reinvent this field in the 1980s and successfully navigated its second renaissance in the early 90s. Today, she is heading into new waters, leaving behind an area of design practice that has become increasingly corporate and codified.

Goldberg's work has always been tied to the cultural sector, but not to the elitist sphere of museum identities and academic publishing. A New Yorker to the core, she entered the profession by way of mass media. After graduating from The Cooper Union in 1975, she learned the trade from art director Lou Dorfsman at CBS Television, producing ads for TV Guide in an all-male, old-school, cut-and-paste bullpen. She soon became an art director herself, creating ads for CBS Records. But her passion was for design, not art direction, and her inspiration came from the work of Paula Scher and Henrietta Condak, who were producing witty, visually sophisticated album covers for CBS Records. Working in the classical music division at CBS, Goldberg created designs that combined type and image in a loose, decorative manner, as seen in her cover for Tchaikovsky's The Seasons.

Goldberg left CBS Records in the early '80s to start her own business, working independently for the music industry and then, around 1984, for book publishers. Post-modernism had become the battle cry in art and architecture. The modernist ideologies of functionalism, truth to materials and purity of form were under attack, as new values of decoration, pastiche and eclecticism bubbled to the surface. Like her contemporary Louise Fili, Goldberg brought these ideas to the field of book cover design, then a stale medium trapped in convention. In Goldberg's 1985 cover for Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, she borrowed from the graphic style of the Vienna Secession, creating densely ornamental lettering locked together within a heavy linear framework. Her design is directly modeled after Josef Hoffmann's 1903 identity for the Wiener Werkstatte.

Post-modernism was not a singular movement, and its attack against modernist orthodoxy yielded a diversity of positions that divided-and energized-graphic design in the '80s. Tibor Kalman, who did more than anyone to keep that decade interesting, attacked the work of Goldberg-and many others-at the AIGA's national conference in San Antonio, Texas, in 1989. Kalman lambasted her Rilke cover for "pillaging history." A few years later, he minted the phrase "jive modernism" in reference to visually-based references to early 20th century art references that, he claimed, ignored the utopian, revolutionary basis of the avant-garde while producing empty, commercially-driven decoration.

While some designers were embittered by Kalman's polemics, Goldberg responded to the uproar with a sense of humor. Her work had been pushed into a fray that was dividing the design world, and it was more exciting to be part of the fight than to be left out at the margins. "It didn't kill me," she recalls. "I was surprised by the intensity of the discussion. While I was busy pillaging history, Tibor was busy pillaging the vernacular. We were all pillagers."

Goldberg's use of history is part of its own historical continuum, that of New York pop design. She employs historical imagery sporadically, not programmatically, referring to past styles not to as a matter of principle, but as a matter of appropriateness. In fact, modernist quotations are few and far between in Goldberg's work, just as they are in the work of Paula Scher, who outraged many Swiss-educated designers for parodying Herbert Matter in a poster for Swatch in the late 80s. Goldberg and Scher both came of age under the ascendence of the Push Pin designers, who forged an indelible American design ethos-at once artistic and commercial-that freely incorporates diverse styles. For Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, as well as for younger designers like Goldberg and Scher, early modernism is just one source of imagery among many-it is no more sacred than the rest of visual culture's rich archive of idioms. Goldberg has even caught herself quoting Josef Hoffmann-in her design for Women on War, she rendered a similar compositional device with sharper, more angular forms.

Goldberg's historical sources have ranged from Victorian ephemera to everyday icons. For the cover of In Pursuit of the English, she combined diverse fonts in a densely knit composition recalling letterpress posters. This typographic block repeats across the bottom of the cover, invoking a make-ready sheet retrieved from the printer's floor. Her design for Unravelling consists of a small typographic label-reminiscent of 19th century packaging-that punctuates a pale, soft photograph of eggs cradled in a woman's hands. One of Goldberg's most exquisite pieces, her jacket for John Fowles's Wormholes, is an homage to the great modernist designer Alvin Lustig. Not a quotation of any single work, Wormholes employs simple strips of color to depict books stored on a shelf Recalling Lustig's color palette and his simple, cut-- paper forms, the cover successfully invokes a mid-century feeling-and avoids the cliche image of old leather books.