Gorey’s interpretation for Kafka’s Amerika, which shows a Goreyesque
character—an almost-skeletal silhouette standing on the closely cropped
deck of a ship entering New York harbor. With only a hint of pink in the
clouds, this otherwise-dark, lugubrious image is not the typical prequel for
Kafka’s critical vision of America but rather a snapshot of every new
immigrant’s fears upon entering a strange land.
For someone who professed not to know where he was going
professionally, Gorey’s covers reveal a skillful and unique sense of
composition. He created not only a strong identity for Anchor but also
memorable icons for the books themselves, regardless of his opinion about
their contents. Notable is his work for the Henry James novels published by
Anchor, which Gorey insists was “all a mistake” because this is one author
“whom I hate more than anybody else in the world except for Picasso. I’ve
read everything of Henry James, some of it twice, and every time I do it I
think, ‘Why am I doing this again? Why am I torturing myself?’ Everybody
thought how sensitive I was to Henry James, and I thought, ‘Oh sure, kids.’
If it’s because I hate him so much, that’s probably true.”
Most of Gorey’s work was illustrative, but for a few books he
designed only lettered covers (what he insists on calling “tacky hand-
lettering”). One such was Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The reason, he admitted,
was fairly simple. “Was I planning to sit down and read Kierkegaard at that
point? No, I wasn’t! And it wouldn’t have helped if I had, I’m sure. I
probably would have been completely paralyzed.”
Gorey left Anchor in 1960 when Jason Epstein started the Looking-
Glass Library with Celia Carroll. “The idea was that it was going to do for
children’s books what Anchor had done for the parents,” he explains. “The
books were not paperbacks but rather paper-over-boards, and it was really
quite a good series. Well, the paper was perfectly dreadful, but, then, the
paper for everything in those days was perfectly terrible.” Gorey illustrated a
few books, including War of the Worlds(“the less said about those, the
better”); he was both art director and an editor. The books conformed to
Gorey’s taste in nineteenth-century British literature, including Spider’s Palace
by Richard Hughes and Countess Kadeby Charlotte M. Young. After two
years the imprint folded and Gorey moved more into his own realms.
The drawings for his stories and books (many of which are
anthologized in his three Amphigoreycollections or archived at the Gotham
Book Mart in New York City) are rooted in the visual language that
developed while designing covers for Anchor/Doubleday. These covers are,
therefore, artifacts from both a transitional period in paperback history and
the formative years of Gorey’s unique career.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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