tacky little drawing of the Globe Theater from the air, which I found
someplace and copied for a book on Shakespeare by Mark van Doren.” In
addition to the linear drawing style, Gorey’s finished lettering looked as
though it were a comp or a sketch of hand lettering that approximated real
type. At that time, paperbacks either had calligraphic or typeset covers, but
Gorey’s style was betwixt and between: “I was stuck with hand lettering,
which I did very poorly, I always felt—but everybody seemed to like it,” he
says. In fact, when he published his own books, all except the first were
hand-lettered in the manner of his earlier book jackets.
Gorey was not the first to employ hand-drawn letters. Paul
Rand initiated the practice because typesetting was too expensive and
deducted from his overall fee; hand lettering ultimately became a defining
characteristic of his book-cover design. Gorey was not concerned with the
costs; rather, “I didn’t really know too much about type in those days, and
it was simply easier to hand-letter the whole thing than to spec type.
Eventually, though, I did a lot of things that weren’t hand-lettered, as far as
book jackets were concerned.” But lettering became a trademark of his own
work, and he also rendered it for other designers who, he says jokingly,
“were even less competent in lettering than I was.”
In addition to his regular diet of French literature, he also enjoyed
reading British novels and had an admiration for British book-jacket
illustration, which influenced his overall style. A voracious reader his entire
life—“I was much better-read than most of the people who were doing
artwork”—Gorey did not, however, do a lot of preparation for his covers.
“I was usually handed the assignment, and there would be some little
paragraph summarizing the plot,” he explains. It rarely mattered anyway,
since his style was so individual that the covers themselves did not illustrate
the respective plots as much as they evoked moods.
Gorey developed stylistic and compositional conceits that recur
throughout this work. “There were certain kinds of books where I followed
a routine,” he admits, “such as my famous landscape, which was mostly
sky so I could fit in a title. Things like A Hero of Our Timeby Mikhail
Lermontov,Victoryby Joseph Conrad, and The Wanderer by Henri Alain-
Fournier tend to have low-lying landscapes, a lot of sky, sort of odd colors,
and tiny figures that I didn’t have to draw very hard.” He also maintained a
muted and earthy color palette—rather surprising, given that paperback
convention demanded covers that were miniposters, able to grab a reader’s
eye in an instant. Explaining his palette, he says, “It was partly because you
had to keep it to three [flat] colors, plus black. I guess I could have picked
bright reds or blues, but I’ve never been much for that. My palette seems to
be sort of lavender, lemon yellow, olive green, and then a whole series of
absolutely no colors at all.” One of these so-called no-color covers was
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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