Edward Gorey: His Book Cover Art & Design

The esteemed designer Steven Heller provides a splendid illustration, so to speak, of Gorey’s ingenious approach to book jacket designs. His earliest illustrations, gloomy and scratchy, make not look like the “classic” Gorey of, say, “Old Possum…Cats,” but they are still alive today with apt anticipation of the antics-to-come as the pages turn. To have so many in such splendid vivid color does one’s heart good: this is the Gorey who paid the rent who allowed the Gorey to invent Mr. Earbrass and enumerate all the ghastly children and excavate Dracula.

Gave as a gift & recipient loves it.

This is a most excellent collection of the cover illustration work of the great Edward Gorey. Most of the illustrations are full page and wonderfully reproduced. I bought this as an Xmas gift for a dear friend who is a Goreyphile, and she was immensely pleased with it. I may have to get a copy for myself as well.

No matter how hard I try, I am unable to choose just one favorite Edward Gorey (The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Hapless Child, The Evil Garden, etc.) book cover. Gorey authored about 100 of his own works, but he also squeezed in well over 200 cover designs, and they're just as delicious to look at. Over the years, over time, I thought I'd be able to narrow it down, using wisdom and hindsight, to maybe two or three favorites. Or five, or ten. Alas.So I hoped Edward Gorey: His Book Cover Art and Design would somehow expose the Gorey-est of Gorey covers, that it combine thoughtful analysis and consensus among experts, maybe even Gorey himself, to ferret out 'The One', or Ones. Well, not quite. But book designer Steven Heller, with the help of Doubleday Anchor co-worker C. Joerns and A. Brown of Gotham Book Mart, seems to have insight into why so many of us collect these wonderful literary art pieces, and there's not one that will rise above the rest, that nearly each design is as appealing as the next, for all the right reasons.Gorey was a master of combining both the illustrative arts with the literary arts, the visual in service to the intellectual. And for the many who chose to see the bound book as precious objects of desire, there is no parallel to holding a classic work, with cover created by Edward Gorey, in your hands.-- Glen E., Goreyography.com

One page after another of treasurable book covers by a brilliant, unique, immediately identifiable master who always found just the right way to evoke the story within, be it by Conrad, Alain-Fournier, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Gide, Trilling--or himself.

I adore Edward Gorey and have had many of his books. Very New England sensibility, dry wit and exquisite illustraion. I had been looking for many of the older book covers for years! Well worth the price.

Gorey's paperback designs for Anchor/Doubleday are brilliant, and here they all in all their austere glory, so you can finally throw out all those mildewed pbs you have been saving. Excellent book.

As a sometime collector of Edward Gorey material, this book provides wonderful new insight into the unique contribution Gorey has made to literature and the arts. Hard bound, the quality of the book itself is impeccable.