Carin Goldberg Transformed Book and Album Cover Design, Passes

OBITUARY –

Jan. 31, 2023 – Her husband, the architect James Biber, said the cause was a glioblastoma brain tumor.

Ms. 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 best sellers — her cover for Oliver Sacks’s “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” resembles a 17th-century title page — 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.

For Madonna’s first album, in 1983, she framed the young singer’s face with her name, the O’s slyly rendered in red. Her covers for classical music albums were distinguished by “an airy, open style that balanced ornament and white space,” Ellen Lupton, curator emerita at the Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design in New York, which has more than two dozen of Ms. Goldberg’s work in its collections, wrote in a tribute.