posted on 21 Feb 2016

Edward Gorey : His Book Cover Art & Design by Steven Heller

Here at the Letterpress Project we are great fans of the work of Edward Gorey. Over recent years his reputation has grown significantly and his often macabre and twisted tales - self illustrated - are not only amusing but tinged with a dark and sinister undertone. This essentially Gothic imagination has brought Gorey a host of cult followers and, since his death in 2000, the house he lived in on Cape Cod has been turned into a museum of his life and work.

However, before fame came to Gorey he had to earn his living as a jobbing design artist and he did this by drawing and designing book jackets for the publishing house of Doubleday. Gorey was an assiduous worker and, locked away in a small room by himself, he produced hundreds of jacket designs for a wide range of different authors.

These are very much Gorey jackets. He is able to capture the spirit of the book and yet provide images that are unmistakably his own style - a style most people would refer to as 'Gorey-esque'. Steven Heller's essay that prefaces the book plates is informative but not intrusive and plays second fiddle to the fabulous examples of book jackets. Who might ever have imagined that Gorey would be the obvious designer for a book by Marcel Proust? Or Franz Kafka?

The publishers of this book - Pomegranate - deserve lots of praise for not only spotting that this might be a great idea for a book but also for producing something that is a lovely thing to hold and read. I'm not sure why book jacket design is such a neglected and lightly regarded art form and I'd personally like to see a lot more of this uncovering of what I might call 'literary archeology' because this archive could have easily been lost - and what a crime that would have been.

Terry Potter

February 2016