Caustic Cover Critic

Monday, 28 July 2008

Edward Gorey Bonanza Part 3

Goreypalooza continues! This time it's a selection of his covers for children's books. And if, by the way, you're not sure what this Gorey-love is all about, you should read his The Gashlycrumb Tinies, one of his nastily funny versions of a children's ABC book. Full online versions of presumably dubious legality, copyright-wise, are here and here. The latter site is Argentinean, and provides a handy Spanish translation. You never know when you might need to know the phrase, "Z es por Zillah que bebió mucho Gin."

A writer whose own outlook on the world seems appropriately close to Gorey's is Joan Aiken, of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase fame.

A writer I don't know is John Bellairs. His Wikipedia entry has me intrigued, however, and his Dickens- and M. R. James-influenced fantasy/horror/adventure stories seem to have provided Gorey with plenty of alarming characters to draw.

On a lighter note, there are his covers for Mary Rodgers (best known for the multiply-filmed Freaky Friday) and John Ciardi.

The cover blurb for the first of these two Florence Parry Heide books ('Something very strange was happening.') would be the perfect summary of almost every bit of Gorey's work.

The combination of Muriel Spark and Edward Gorey also seems a perfect one: it would have been great if he could have illustrated the jackets of some of her adult novels.

There are many, many more Gorey-illustrated children's books: the man was frighteningly proficient. Here are just a few of them.

Next, in the penultimate of these Gorey posts, a marathon sprint through a random selection of his other covers for other people. Then, in part five, a look at Gorey's covers for his own books.

Edward Gorey Bonanza Part 2

More Gorey! This time, some of the (many) anthologies he designed covers for. It should come as no surprise that, given his penchant for ruined houses, mortally injured children, strange insect gods and terrible mysterious things, Gorey did a lot of covers for ghost story collections. He even edited one himself, The Haunted looking Glass, still available from NYRB Classics...

Here are some others.

Next time, even more Gorey: a selection of his covers for children's books.

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.