Edward Gorey and Faulty Equations

December 9th, 2010 by Art Chantry

Edward Gorey is so famous at this point, that I hardly need to even mention him here. Everybody already knows his work so well. He’s as universally admired as Charles Addams for his peculiar and often bizarre sentiments. However, not a lot of people are aware of his early career.

This is a direct shout out to Jesse Reyes, who turned me on to Gorey’s early work.  Jesse (and his partner, Amy) collect a LOT of cool stuff.  Among their cool junk is a rather extensive (attempting completist) collection of early Gorey. Apparently, a LOT of people collect Gorey, judging from the prices on e-bay.

Gorey, when he was a struggling young artist, spent time working at a publishing house (alongside a handful of other now-known designer/artists) cranking out book cover designs for all sorts of junky stuff. I’ve found covers, jackets, even title typography (adorning other folk’s illustrations) executed by Gorey. I’ve even found books “art directed” by Edward Gorey that have none of his illustration of lettering in evidence. He was simply directing other folks’ work.

Hard to imagine, actually – Edward Gorey as a young, struggling artist. He just seems to be such a huge icon that the thought of him taking on dang near any work to survive seems improbable. Fame does not equal wealth, however. Even the Beatles and the Stones and Bowie were broke at the very peak of their careers. It’s a misconception in our culture that fame=wealth.

Anyway, I gather this stuff and send these along to Jesse and Amy periodically to see if they can add them to their stash. This is my latest find. It’s a “children’s” book of Rumpelstiltskin (no Gorey book is entirely for children). It’s chock full of cool Gorey interpretations of the story.

What I find interesting is that’s it’s in color. I don’t remember ever seeing a color Gorey piece before. It’s kinda weird. Sometimes color is not better. Many times, I’ve designed a piece in b&w only to have the client get excited and decide that “color is better! color sells!” and destroy the whole design. This looks badly colorized, like one of those early colorized vintage movies that Turner Broadcasting did. Yucky.

Frankly, if you can’t design in b&w, you can’t design, and color doesn’t really help much. It seldom is a solution by itself. Even more rarely does it fix a bad image, and it can ruin a good image, especially if that image was intended by the creator as a b&w piece.

A great example is that move “The Mist” (based on a Stephen King novella). It was originally intended to be a b&w film, but the money interests (using that hoary old notion of “color=better”) insisted on shooting it in color. So the director did both. The b&w white version is available only on a specific limited DVD edition of the film as a “director’s cut,” but it’s well worth hunting down. It’s really a completely different (and hugely better) movie in b&w. It was written as a b&w movie by a visual artist using graphic design language. We all know this language, but we often override it as suspect. Dunno why. It’s a great and true language.

I think this Gorey cover – executed in color – looks like crap. It’s a really great illustration ruined by the demands of the publisher – a publisher with enough vision to hire Gorey in the first place, but not enough integrity or courage to allow him to actually do his work. Sound familiar?

Funny, huh? This is sorta “Crappy Gorey.”