Steven Heller on illustrator Edward Gorey and his book cover designs:
“In addition to 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. ‘I was stuck with hand lettering, which I did very poorly, I always felt – but everybody seemed to like it.’
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. 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.’
Gorey did not 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, such as my famous landscape, which was mostly sky so I could fit in a title. Things like A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, Victory by 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 earthly 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.’
[…] Notable is his work for the Henry James novels published by Anchor, which Gorey insists was ‘all a mistake’ because this is one author ‘who I hate more than anybody else in the world except for Picasso. I’ve read everything of Henry James, some of it twice, and every time I do it I think, ‘Why am I doing this again? Why am I torturing myself?’ Everybody thought how sensitive I was to Henry James, and I thought, ‘Oh sure, kids.’ If it’s because I hate him so much, that’s probably true.’
Most of Gorey’s work was illustrative, but for a few books he designed only lettered covers (what he insists on calling ‘tacky hand-lettering’). One such was Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The reason, he admitted, was fairly simple. ‘Was I planning to sit down and read Kierkegaard at that point? No, I wasn’t! And it wouldn’t have helped if I had, I’m sure. I probably would’ve been completely paralyzed.'”
— (via Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design)
