Book Covers^71
Edward GoreyThe public knows him for his animated titles for
the PBS television series Mystery!and the sets and
costumes for the Broadway productions Edward
Gorey’s Draculaand The Mikado. Through his
numerous books and theatrical productions,
Edward Gorey ( 1925 – 2000 )—illustrator, author,
playwright, theater and ballet set designer—has
carved out a unique place in the world of arts and
letters. The imaginary tableaux in his books and
stage plays are replete with turn-of-the-century
appointments (lace curtains in windows, marble
mantelpieces, four-poster beds, vases of aspidistras,
and ornate funeral urns) and peopled by a cast of
eccentric and sinister gents, dames, and tykes as
well as a menagerie of autochthonous hippos, birds,
alligators, bats, and cats. Through his macabre
crosshatched drawings and staccato linguistic
rhythms, Gorey (the name is certainly appropriate)
has created a world that transcends all sense of time
and place. His surreal black humor is literally a study in light and dark in
which the unspeakable is spoken, the unthinkable is thought, and the
horrific—murder, mayhem, and unexplained disappearances—is comic.
In 1953 , he published his first book,The Unstrung Harp, an odd
thirty-page tale illustrated in a satiric Edwardian manner, about the trials
and tribulations of the mythical author Clavius Frederick Earbrass, a
pathetic figure in a fur coat who lives alone in a stately house full of
portraits and statuettes that look exactly like him. That same year, he
accepted a position in the art department of Anchor/Doubleday, where he
did pasteups and lettering. He also designed about fifty book covers before
leaving in 1960. These illustrated covers comprise a small but significant
chapter in the history of paperback cover design and in the legacy of the
white-bearded, fur-coated man who made them.
All but forgotten today, these covers established a visual
personality for a company that was founded to reprint many of the world’s
classic texts, some of which were previously published in paperback versions
during the late 1930 s and 1940 s, when virtually all mass-market books were