Skip to main content

When Edward Gorey Designed Book Covers for Classic Novels: See His Ironic-Gothic Take on Dickens, Conrad, Poe & More

Twenty years after his death, it's cooler than ever to like Edward Gorey. This is evidenced not just by the frequent posting of his intensively crosshatched, Victorian- and Edwardian-period-inflected, grimly comic art on social media, but by the number of artists who now claim him as an influence. Where, one wonders, did they come across Gorey in the first place? Having published more than a hundred books in his lifetime (if often in small runs from obscure presses), he certainly put the work out there to be found.

But it was the much more well-known books of other writers like Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, and Herman Melville that first propagated Gorey's sensibility of, as The New York Times' Steven Kurutz puts it, "camp-macabre, ironic-gothic or dark-whimsy."

Gorey designed the covers for these books and others between 1953 to 1960, when he worked at the art department of publishers Doubleday Anchor. He had been tasked specifically with their new series of paperbacks meant to be "serious," as opposed to the abundance of cheap, lowbrow, and often salaciously packaged novels that had inspired the term "pulp fiction."

Of the first 200 titles in this series, says Goreyography, "about a fourth of these have line drawn covers by Gorey." Even when other artists (the lineup of whom included Leonard Baskin, Milton Glaser, Philippe Julian, and Andy Warhol) drew the illustration, "Gorey then designed the finished product lending a uniform appearance to the whole line." You can see a variety of Gorey's Doubleday Anchor paperback covers at Lithub, the most Goreyesque of which (such as Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent at the top of the post) not only bear his illustrations but contain nothing not drawn by Gorey, text and colophon included.

"When these covers first appeared against the backdrop of mass-market covers in general," according to Goreyography, "they were hailed as 'modern' and 'arty.' Print magazine praised 'a feeling of unity... a quality of their own.'" The end of Gorey's time at Doubleday didn't mean the end of his work on others' books: in the 1970s, for example, he contributed suitably eerie cover and interior art to John Bellairs' young-adult novel The House with a Clock in Its Walls and five of the sequels that would follow it. It was in Bellairs' books that I first encountered the visions of Edward Gorey. More than a few readers of my generation and the generations since could say the same — and also that we've been pleasurably haunted by them ever since.

See more covers over at Lithub.

Related Content:

Edward Gorey Illustrates H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inimitable Gothic Style (1960)

Lemony Snicket Reveals His Edward Gorey Obsession in an Upcoming Animated Documentary

Edward Gorey Talks About His Love Cats & More in the Animated Series, “Goreytelling”

The Best of the Edward Gorey Envelope Art Contest

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

When Edward Gorey Designed Book Covers for Classic Novels: See His Ironic-Gothic Take on Dickens, Conrad, Poe & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2PLj2dL
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more