Designer of book covers and Madonna’s first album dies

Carin Goldberg, a graphic designer whose pathbreaking work included covers for Madonna’s first album cover and thousands of books, including a series of Kurt Vonnegut paperbacks that reinvigorated the author’s sales and a reissue of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” that echoed a late 1920s motif, died Jan. 19 at her home in Stanfordville, N.Y. She was 69.

The cause was a glioblastoma brain tumor, said her husband, James Biber.

A self-described “pithy, cynical, wisecracking New York Jew,” Goldberg entered the male-dominated, riskaverse world of design in 1975. She employed “visual innuendo and iconography,” she once said, to “tell a story without telling the story.” Though she designed hundreds of album covers, Goldberg was most celebrated for her book covers, which John Updike called “bold and festive” and numbered in the thousands.

With a postmodern flair, Goldberg drew on historical images and typefaces to 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,” Ellen Lupton, curator emerita at the Cooper Hewitt museum, wrote in the design industry magazine Graphis.

For the 1986 reissue of “Ulysses,” the publisher instructed Goldberg to pay tribute to the book’s 1949 hardcover, which featured an enormous letter U. She designed a cover that echoed the colors and Futura Bold typeface of a 1928 poster by German designer Paul Renner. Designer Tibor Kalman criticized her for “pillaging history,” to which Goldberg retorted, “We’re all pillagers.”

“I am very suspicious when artists or designers claim they never ‘pillage,’” she told Step magazine. “Not possible. It’s to what degree and the context and intent that matter.”

Goldberg’s other memorable book covers include “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks, “Sonnets to Orpheus” by Rainer Maria Rilke, and the paperback reissues of Vonnegut’s novels, with edge-to-edge letter Vs seemingly bursting, like the author’s writing and persona, off the covers.