adorned with prurient covers designed to pander to the voyeuristic reader.
Then the style was to cover such literary classics as Tolstoy’s War and Peace
or Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishmentwith bosomy damsels in distress,
but by the late 1940 s, cooler, more rational heads prevailed. In the 1950 s,
certain paperbacks aimed at serious readers were given more sophisticated
cover art by such modern designers as Alvin Lustig, Paul Rand, Rudolph
de Harak, and Leo Lionni. Gorey’s covers for Anchor/Doubleday were not
orthodox modern design but they were astute interpretations of the texts,
handsomely designed, and smartly composed.
Gorey’s involvement began inauspiciously. He had known
Doubleday editors Barbara Zimmerman and Jason Epstein from his days at
Harvard. He visited New York just before Christmas of 1952 , when they
were starting Anchor Books, and did a few freelance covers for them. In
turn they offered him a job in their small art department. “At first I turned
it down,” Gorey recalls, “because I didn’t want to live in New York....So
much for that. I realized that I was starving to death in Boston and took
the job the next year.”
Gorey was born in Chicago, where he graduated from high school
in 1942. He applied to the University of Chicago, Carnegie Tech (as it
was known as in those days), and Harvard. “I went to this kind of fancy,
intellectually (so to speak) reputable private school in Chicago, so in those
days it was fairly easy to be admitted to Harvard,” he explains. “I couldn’t
get in now if I crawled on my hands and knees from here to Cambridge.”
After he was discharged from the army in January of 1946 , he received his
acceptance to Harvard and attended on the GI Bill. “So I trotted off to
major in French, without bothering to discover whether they had a
particularly good French department or not.”
At that time Gorey was drawing pictures, “if that’s what you want
to call it,” he quips about his seeming lack of motivations, “with the intent
of nothing at all, I assure you. I’ve never had any intentions about anything.
That’s why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a
literal sense.” So he took the job in the publishing-house art department,
which, he admits, wasn’t too taxing. “In fact, when I saw some of the
pasteups that other people did, I thought that these well-known artists [like
Ben Shahn and others who did covers] really were all thumbs. I never had
much patience with having to redo other people’s pasteups, which looked
like they’d just flung the lettering on the page.”
In addition to this menial work, he designed covers. His first,
Lafcadio’s Adventuresby André Gide, revealed Gorey’s aptitude for classical
drawing with an idiosyncratic twist. The style was rooted in nineteenth-
century representationalism but was not so easily pigeonholed into a
specific time frame. His second cover was what he describes as “a kind of
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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