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Poster Commentary
"A human being is like a letter of the alphabet: to produce a word, it must combine with another."Benjamin Mandelstamm
Poster design:Carin Goldberg
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by Erica Brown

It is no surprise that Benjamin Mandelstamm compared human beings to letters. Words are the way in which we construct reality; sentences are the building blocks of communication. Each sentence is broken down into words, each word into letters. But letters rarely stand alone if they intend to communicate meaning. They must be combined with others to make the most basic words. Forget just one letter, and you’ve misspelled a word. In the shorthand of today’s communication, just try sending an email with one wrong letter in the address. It won’t work.

Benjamin Mandelstamm was born in Zagare, Lithuania, in the 19th century. He was a writer and a leading political reformist who organized Jews to resist Russian oppression. Mandelstamm wrote a book about the Jews of Zagare, but no copies are known to exist today. He understood that revolutions require more than one person. The collective voice is always stronger than a voice alone.

Zagare suffered many significant fires, and a cholera epidemic wiped out a large number of its Jews in 1848. The fact that Mandelstamm was interested in the history of his town may also be significant in inspiring this idea of words being like people, both working best in combination with each other. Mandelstamm died in 1886.

In isolation we can work, create, master and inspire others. The letter i stands alone. It is powerful, but not as powerful as it could be in conjunction with others. Like the letters in words, together we can rebuild, rethink and shape a culture. We can change the future.

Author
Benjamin Mandelstamm
1805–1886
Lived in Ukraine
Writer and activist

Benjamin Mandelstamm was a leading figure in the 19th-century “Enlightenment” (Haskalah) movement in Eastern European Jewish life. He advocated reclaiming Hebrew as a modern literary language and defended the rights of Jews in secular society. 

Mandelstamm lived in Lithuania and the Ukraine, where he wrote novels, travel memoirs and articles for Hebrew-language newspapers, including notable pieces about his family and about the anti-Jewish riots of 1881–1882. In one of his longer works, Paris, he paints a detailed picture of life in the French capital in 1875. In A Vision for Our Time, he presents a plan for improving social and political conditions for Russian Jews.

Mandelstamm argued for broadly inclusive forms of education, and he was an outspoken critic of Orthodox control of Jewish education within Eastern European Jewish communities.

 

Artist
Carin Goldberg
New York
Graphic designer
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Carin Goldberg was born in New York City and studied at the Cooper Union School of Art. She began her career as a staff designer at CBS Television, CBS Records and Atlantic Records before establishing her own firm, Carin Goldberg Design, in 1982.

Over the following two decades Goldberg designed hundreds of book jackets for the major American publishing houses, including Simon & Schuster, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus & Giroux, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Hyperion. She also designed dozens of album covers for record labels such as Warner Bros., Motown, Nonesuch, EMI and Sony (formerly CBS) Records. Her work encompasses artists as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Steve Reich and Madonna.

In recent years Goldberg’s image making has expanded to publication design and brand consulting for clients including the Gap (AR Media), Time Inc., Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, the School of Visual Arts and Sterling Brands. From 2002 to 2004 she was creative director at Time Inc. Custom Publishing, where she designed and consulted on over 25 publications for clients that included Gallup, the New York Stock Exchange, Microsoft and Citigroup. Her work has appeared in and on the covers of The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, The Atlantic and Wired magazine.

Her work has also appeared in landmark surveys such as Graphic Design in America at the Walker Art Center (1989); Mixing Messages at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (1996); By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005); AGI: Graphic Design Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2007); and How to Be a Great Graphic Designer (Debbie Millman, Allworth Press, 2007). She has been featured in Time, The New Yorker, the New York Times, Adweek, and every major design publication. She has lectured and exhibited internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; the Cooper-Hewitt, New York; and the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, China.

Goldberg has won hundreds of awards, including a silver medal from the Art Directors Club and the Golden Pencil from The One Club, and has twice received the publishing industry’s prestigious Literary Marketplace Award. She is one of the first recipients of the Art Directors Club Grandmasters Award for Excellence in Education (2008). In 2009 she was awarded the prestigious American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal, an honor considered to be the highest in America recognizing an exemplary career in graphic design. In 2009, she received the Cooper Union President’s Citation for “exceptional contributions to the field of graphic design,” awarded annually at commencement “to distinguished individuals who have made important contributions to art, architecture, and engineering, or interdisciplinary studies.”

In 2008 she completed a two-year term as president of the New York chapter of the AIGA. She also served on the chapter’s board from 2002 to 2004. She has been a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale since 1999 and served on its board of directors from 2006 to 2009.

From November 2010 to January 2011, a retrospective of Goldberg’s work and career was exhibited at Musée Géo-Charles, Échirolles, France. The exhibition was a part of the Festival le Mois du Graphisme in Échirolles, where she taught a weeklong master class before the opening of the exhibition.

Goldberg has taught Third Year Typography and Senior Portfolio Thesis at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for 28 years. She is the designer and author of Catalog (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2001).

She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn, New York.

Quote
"A human being is like a letter of the alphabet: to produce a word, it must combine with another."Benjamin Mandelstamm

A human being is like a letter of the alphabet: to produce a word, it must combine with another.  Indeed, there are some people who are mere vowels to others.  And then there is the person who stands as a question mark or exclamation mark in the book of life, about whom we'll never know who or what or why that person is here on this earth.