Essay: "Book Covers"

This essay provides a brief description of Edward Gorey's career, with the emphasis on his extensive book cover designs.  In 1953, he accepted a position at Anchor/Doubleday, doing pasteups and lettering.  Before he left the company in 1960, he had designed approximately fifty book covers.  Author Steve Heller describes the importance of these works.  "These illustrated covers comprise a small but significant chapter in the history of paperback cover design and in the legacy of the white-bearded, fur-coated man who made them.  All but forgotten today, these covers established a visual personality for a company that was founded to reprint many of the world's classic texts, some of which were previously published in paperback versions during the late 1930s and 1940s, when virtually all mass-market books were adorned with prurient covers designed to pander to the voyeuristic reader" (71-2)  Gorey's covers were essential to the success of Anchor's paperbacks, as they established a distinct identity for the company; the artist's style was more mature and refined that that featured on pulp fictions, and it was idiosyncratic, and therefore remained in the viewer's consciousness.