Edward Gorey Bonanza Part 1

A long time ago I displayed the lovely Edward Gorey cover for H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, reprinted by NYRB Classics. They have also just released the version of Rex Warner's Men and Gods which Gorey illustrated.




This seems as good an excuse as any to have a look at some of Gorey's other covers. He did a lot, including those for his own books, which we'll look at in a few days. The most comprehensive list of books he worked on that I can find is here: those in the various Gorey books I own are sadly incomplete.

In fact, Gorey began his career as an illustrator by doing book covers. He did a lot for classics reprinted by Anchor/Doubleday in the 1950s. Here are a selection: some of these aren't the best-quality images, I'm afraid, but they are the best I could locate.















He also did covers for John Buchan's The 39 Steps...



..Bram Stoker's Dracula...



..Thomas Wolfe's The Web and the Rock...



..T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats...



..Edward Lear's The Dong with a Luminous Nose...



..and Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales...



..as well as this collection of Victorian supernatural novels.



Startlingly, this is only a fraction of the books he covered. Next time we'll look at a few of the (many) anthologies he designed jackets for.