For my Archeology of the Book class, I'm writing a research paper about the book The Original Frankenstein, which includes the two earliest surviving drafts of Frankenstein. One is a rough draft by Mary alone, and the other is edited by Percy Shelley, just like editors edit author's work today. Both The Original Frankenstein and The Frankenstein Notebooks--facsimiles of the surviving earliest draft--are edited by Charles E. Robinson.
It's disturbing to read about how people--not only nineteenth-century reviewers but even late twentieth-century scholars--have dismissively claimed or suggested that Percy rather than Mary was the primary author. It reminds me of when I was a teenager and got a story published in the school newspaper for the first time: some students gushed about my writing, but at least one classmate said, "Your brother wrote that story!" I felt deeply offended and unappreciated, especially since all my life I had been bombarded with the message that my brother is so intelligent and I'm stupid. Both situations show dismissiveness toward a teenager girl, probably because she's young and female. Give credit where credit is due. Fortunately, The Frankenstein Notebooks shows Mary Shelley's own handwriting and proves that she was the author and that Percy was the editor.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Thursday, May 5, 2011
The Peculiar Inkwell: Edward Gorey and Book Art
Edward Gorey did not grow up in a manor house in Edwardian England. He was born in Chicago in 1925 and grew up there. His art background consisted largely of having a good teacher in elementary school and attending Saturday art classes as a high school kid (Ascending, p. 21). He never received any art degrees. He taught himself how to read at the age of three and a half, and between the ages of five and seven he read the Alice books and Dracula. His mother was employed as a government clerk, and his father was (like mine) a newspaper journalist (Ascending, p. 151).
After high school, Gorey spent one semester at the Art Institute of Chicago (Ascending, pp. 26-7), before he was drafted (it was World War II) and worked in Utah as a clerk for the army; the only thing he got out of his army experience was time he spent writing plays (Theroux, p. 21). At the age of twenty-one, he finally went off to Harvard, where he majored in French and fell asleep in class, and where he already did quite a bit of illustration and participated in theater. He and his roommate, the poet Frank O’Hara (Theroux, pp. 23, 25), did eccentric things such as dress like Oscar Wilde and steal a tombstone, which they used for a table in their dorm room.
For many years, Gorey lived in both a studio apartment in New York City and a house in Cape Cod, where he stayed with cousins and cooked for them. He was asexual and never married, and he typically lived with between three and six cats. He was so enthusiastic about ballet choreographed by George Ballantine, that he attended just about every performance of the New York City Ballet for over twenty years, till George Ballantine died in 1983. Afterwards, Gorey gave up his New York apartment and bought his own house in Cape Cod, where he lived from then on and only visited New York to see ballet performances (Theroux, p. 22).
Gorey’s house in Cape Cod was built in about 1800, so it already had a lot of character, but he filled it with books, cats, and the sundry items he collected, such as bits of Victorian architecture (particularly finials) and stuffed toy animals. Now it is a museum called the Edward Gorey House, appropriately still occupied by cats, and filled with displays of his artwork and possessions. Alexander Theroux describes the house: “The dark, six or seven-room house on No. 8 Strawberry Lane, resembling the houses in his books, is a strange, wooden, sort of ancestral-looking thing with cold angles and a chimney in the center (p. 71).
Gorey’s style of dress was as eccentric as his house. He wore fur coats (that he bought at thrift stores [Theroux, p. 121]) until animal rights consciousness led him to stop in the 1980s (Sullivan). He wore a lot of jewelry, particularly large rings on his fingers, necklaces, and earrings. But his clothing was mostly casual, such as sweatshirts, jeans, and sneakers (Sullivan). One of the delights of looking at Edward Gorey’s illustrations is identifying figures that resemble the artist himself: with beard, fur coat, and sneakers.
Doubleday and Book Covers
John Updike’s time as a student at Harvard overlapped that of Edward Gorey. According to Updike, Edward Gorey was already designing covers while a student: Gorey illustrated the front cover of the college’s literary magazine with a peculiar image of two Edwardian men throwing sticks at bodiless heads. Updike saw the same distinctive style illustrating the covers of Commencement programs. Edward Gorey’s highly recognizable drawing style was already full-fledged when he was in college (McDermott, foreword).
After college, in 1953, Gorey’s friendship with two Doubleday editors, Barbara Zimmerman and Jason Epstein (author of The Book Business) got him a job in the art department of Doubleday Books in New York. He had visited New York in 1952, where he drew a few book covers for them, and they wanted him to stay (Ascending, p. 232). For seven years, he designed, lettered, and illustrated books for the Anchor imprint (Theroux, p. 26). (I’ve occasionally come across some of these Gorey-illustrated books in used book stores, including a copy of Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida.) He meanwhile made time to write his own books, and a (now long dead) publishing company called Duell, Sloan & Pearce published the first two, The Unstrung Harp and The Listing Attic (Ascending, p.27).
A major part of Gorey’s work during his time at Doubleday (1953-1960) was making paste-ups (Ascending, p. 233). Nowadays pages are designed in computer programs such as InDesign, QuarkXPress, and PageMaker, but back then it was done by hand. The designer literally glued text and images on a piece of cardboard to indicate where it would be positioned on the page; the whole purpose was to show where everything, including illustrations and headings, went in the book (Lee, pp. 176-7).
At Doubleday, he was promoted from making paste-ups to illustrating and designing covers. The first was for Andre Gide’s book Lafcadio’s Adventures, followed by a picture of the Globe Theater for the cover of a book about Shakespeare (Ascending, p. 233). The people in charge liked his hand lettering (although he didn’t), so he ended up typically using his distinctive hand-lettered style on many covers. Even for his own books, people insisted that he hand-letter, so he stuck with that; besides, he thought it was easier than type (Ascending, pp. 233-4).
While his own books were almost always black and white, his Doubleday paperbacks often had some muted colors. The policy with Doubleday was to use three colors in addition to black, and Gorey preferred less bright colors, such as olive and lavender (Ascending, p. 235).
Gorey left Doubleday to collaborate with Jason Epstein and Celia Carroll on a small publishing company called The Looking-Glass Library. This was children’s books made of “paper over boards” (Ascending, p. 236) and largely included near-forgotten nineteen-century literature. Gorey worked as the art director and illustrator; he also helped with acquisitions (Ascending, p. 237). Epstein lost interest after a couple years, and Looking-Glass Books folded. Meanwhile, Gorey did some freelance for Vintage, another publisher of paperbacks, and in 1963 was the art director for a publishing company called Bobbs Merrill, where he was among many who were fired. But he had so much freelance work to do that he didn’t have time for job hunting (Ascending, p. 237).
Even after he was no longer a regular designer and illustrator of book covers, he continued to illustrate books when hired to do so (Ascending, p. 238). That is why I’ve come across the occasional anthology of plays or stories with cover art that has Gorey’s distinct style, and why I even have a special Gorey-illustrated edition of Dracula, published by Barnes and Noble in the 1990s.
Freelancing
Books that Gorey not only designed and illustrated but also wrote himself are highly recognizable by his unique style. His trademarks are extremely tall, slender people wearing costumes from between the 1890s and the 1920s; strange lurking monsters; whimsical, smiling cats; interior scenes with wallpaper, paneling, urns, and elegantly draped curtains; and somewhat barren landscapes. His style is compulsively detailed with hatching and regular patterns galore.
During the 1950s and 60s, Gorey had trouble getting some of his unsettling books published. This was particularly the case with The Beastly Baby, which was too disturbing and warped a subject for any publisher to touch at the time, so finally Gorey decided to self-publish it, a total of two hundred copies (Theroux, p. 27). Thus he started Fantod Press.
Gorey’s studio in his Cape Cod house included a small wooden work table on which sat many bottles of ink and pens, a couple of metal frogs (one of which had a mouthful of paintbrushes), and a Figbash mug full of bookmarks. He tolerated his cats jumping on the table and leaving inky paw prints on a drawing (McDermott, “The Studio”). His main drawing materials consisted of paper and ink:
“As to materials, virtually everything is done on Strathmore two-ply matt finish. For years I used Hunt #204 penpoints and Higgins India ink; somewhere along the line I switched to Gillotts titquill penpoints and Pelikan ink. When Gillotts titquills disappeared, I went with reluctance back to Hunt #104 (Ascending, pp. 86, 88).”
He occasionally used watercolors, but even then he first drew the image. He rarely used actual models and mostly took images freely; he had to look at pictures of old cars, for instance, in order to draw an automobile, and he relied heavily on Dover books (Ascending, pp. 89-90). Gorey said in an interview:
All my drawings are done to the size of reproduction, the only exception being when the final result is going to be more than, say, six inches in any direction, then I work smaller and have it blown up, because I am uncomfortable working any larger unless I absolutely have to.
I correct drawings only in a very minor way—with white tempera and/or a razor blade. In desperation I may redraw a segment and paste it over if I feel unable to redo the rest of the drawing as well a second time (Ascending, p. 89).
Gorey always completed the text before illustrating it, and all the drawings of one book typically took a month or two. Sometimes he didn’t start the illustrations until ten years after he wrote the text, and it could be years before he completed the illustrations (Ross, p. 22). Books about Gorey’s art are sprinkled with sketches and notes for his work; he created rough, basic sketches before working on the final inked images. To draw one of his detailed images took a day or two (Ascending, p. 32). In the 1990s, he bought a Mac and took classes on Adobe Photoshop and illustrator…only to discover that his drawing style didn’t suit this technology, so he gave up on it (McDermott, “The Library.”)
The publisher of The Listing Attic admired his hand-lettering when he showed samples, and that is how he ended up hand-lettering his work, even though he thought it looked bad (Ascending, p. 90). Despite this aversion, he continued to hand-letter his books and covers for the rest of his life, apparently out of habit.
Gorey came up with stories and wrote them first, before he started drawing. In interviews, he mentioned having a great many—fifty to seventy-five—books written out but not yet illustrated. (Now that he’s dead, I wonder if he ever finished all those books, or whether at least some of them will be published without the illustrations; some were used for productions of plays that Gorey worked on in the 1980s and 90s.) Although his books are short on words and dominated by his illustrations, he thought of himself first and foremost as a writer (Ascending, p. 21).
Gorey’s books include some novelties such as pop-up books and tiny, unusual flip-books. He wrote (under pseudonyms that are acronyms of his real name) flip-books like The Floating Elephant, which when turned backward, is The Dancing Rock. One way, the book illustrates a little elephant floating skyward, and the other way it illustrates a moving boulder (Theroux, p. 65). This two-in-one flipbook was published in the 1990s, and when out of curiosity I looked up The Floating Elephant on Amazon, I discovered that it sells used for between $100 and $350. Another of Gorey’s flipbooks, Figbash Acrobate, is available on Amazon for either $200 or $475.
Influences
Nineteenth-century book illustrations, which were engravings made from steel or wood, heavily influenced Gorey’s illustrations. Lewis Carroll and his illustrator John Tenniel are thought to have influenced Gorey, and his work certainly reminds me of that pair; some people also think Edward Lear influenced his work. But it’s more general than that, although he was an avid fan of both Carroll and Lear (Ascending, p. 21).
Gorey’s favorite authors were Jane Austen and Lady Murasaki (the Japanese author of The Tales of Genji, the world’s first novel). He said, “I’m very fond of Japanese and Chinese literature. I like to work in that way, leaving things out, being very brief,” and he mentioned Ronald Firbank, Samuel Becket, and Jorge Luis Borges but wasn’t entirely sure “influences” was the right word for them (Ascending, pp. 22-3). Japanese art had some influence on his work; in particular, his ocean waves in Lear’s The Dong with the Luminous Nose look strikingly like those in Katsushiki Hokusai’s painting The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (Ross, p. 90).
Gorey was also influenced by art that was neither illustration nor literature. He was an avid fan of Louis Feuillade, who created silent films such as Fantomas, Les Vampires, Tih Minh, and Barrabas. In Elegant Enigmas, Karen Wilkin’s description of Feuillade’s films proves that Gorey’s artwork is heavily influenced by them, since the films involve:
women in long dresses and enormous hats with plumes, and men with magnificent moustaches wearing top hats and frock coats, all playing out mysterious dramas in pompously furnished interiors, long corridors with multiple doors, and outdoor settings with rows of iron railings (Elegant, p. 16).
Gorey was fascinated by the choreography of Georges Ballantine, though he was uncertain how this influenced his own art, other than writing a couple of little books about ballet dancers. Looking at books that he both wrote and illustrated, I can see how his enthusiasm for ballet, for film, and for theater affected his work: each square or rectangular image resembles a stage set; the figures pose like ballet dancers; the images together progress like melodramatic silent films.
Conclusion
Edward Gorey’s artistic style is truly unique and easy to recognize across a bookstore. While his work is so unique and distinctive, it was also influenced by a variety of art. Often this influence was extremely subtle, such as something vague about the tone of one of his little books. All art is somewhat derivative, including Gorey’s, but at the same time his work manages to be truly original. He has inspired fans worldwide—undoubtedly he has influenced filmmaker Tim Burton—and will continue to pique the interest of other artists and writers, just as nineteenth-century illustrators like John Tenniel did for him. His interiors, urns, cats, and Edwardian people have become iconic.
Bibliography
Edward Gorey House Museum, http://www.edwardgoreyhouse.org/, accessed 3/5/11.
Marshall. Bookmaking: Editing/Design/Production, 3rd Ed. W. W. Norton & Company, NY: 2004.
Marci and Deth, “Edward Gorey Doubleday Anchor Paperbacks,” http://www.flickr.com /photos/marcianddeth/sets/72157623465700599/detail/?page=4, accessed 3/2/11. (This is the source of all Doubleday cover images in this essay.)
McDermott, Kevin, photos and text. John Updike, foreword. Elephant House: or, The Home of Edward Gorey. Pomegranate, San Francisco: 2003. (No page numbers)
Ross, Clifford, and Karen Wilkin. The World of Edward Gorey. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., NY: 1996.
Sullivan, James. “From the Cape, a View of Edward Gorey,” Boston Globe, http://www.boston.com /ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/02/06/figuring_out_why_edward_gorey_liked_what_he_liked/?page=2, accessed 3/2/11.
Theroux, Alexander. The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Fantagraphics Books, Inc., Seattle: 2011.
Wilkin, Karen, Selected and Edited by. Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey. Harcourt, Inc., NY: 2001.
Wilkin, Karen. Elegant Enigmas: the Art of Edward Gorey. Pomegranate, San Francisco: 2009.
After high school, Gorey spent one semester at the Art Institute of Chicago (Ascending, pp. 26-7), before he was drafted (it was World War II) and worked in Utah as a clerk for the army; the only thing he got out of his army experience was time he spent writing plays (Theroux, p. 21). At the age of twenty-one, he finally went off to Harvard, where he majored in French and fell asleep in class, and where he already did quite a bit of illustration and participated in theater. He and his roommate, the poet Frank O’Hara (Theroux, pp. 23, 25), did eccentric things such as dress like Oscar Wilde and steal a tombstone, which they used for a table in their dorm room.
For many years, Gorey lived in both a studio apartment in New York City and a house in Cape Cod, where he stayed with cousins and cooked for them. He was asexual and never married, and he typically lived with between three and six cats. He was so enthusiastic about ballet choreographed by George Ballantine, that he attended just about every performance of the New York City Ballet for over twenty years, till George Ballantine died in 1983. Afterwards, Gorey gave up his New York apartment and bought his own house in Cape Cod, where he lived from then on and only visited New York to see ballet performances (Theroux, p. 22).
Gorey’s house in Cape Cod was built in about 1800, so it already had a lot of character, but he filled it with books, cats, and the sundry items he collected, such as bits of Victorian architecture (particularly finials) and stuffed toy animals. Now it is a museum called the Edward Gorey House, appropriately still occupied by cats, and filled with displays of his artwork and possessions. Alexander Theroux describes the house: “The dark, six or seven-room house on No. 8 Strawberry Lane, resembling the houses in his books, is a strange, wooden, sort of ancestral-looking thing with cold angles and a chimney in the center (p. 71).
Gorey’s style of dress was as eccentric as his house. He wore fur coats (that he bought at thrift stores [Theroux, p. 121]) until animal rights consciousness led him to stop in the 1980s (Sullivan). He wore a lot of jewelry, particularly large rings on his fingers, necklaces, and earrings. But his clothing was mostly casual, such as sweatshirts, jeans, and sneakers (Sullivan). One of the delights of looking at Edward Gorey’s illustrations is identifying figures that resemble the artist himself: with beard, fur coat, and sneakers.
Doubleday and Book Covers
John Updike’s time as a student at Harvard overlapped that of Edward Gorey. According to Updike, Edward Gorey was already designing covers while a student: Gorey illustrated the front cover of the college’s literary magazine with a peculiar image of two Edwardian men throwing sticks at bodiless heads. Updike saw the same distinctive style illustrating the covers of Commencement programs. Edward Gorey’s highly recognizable drawing style was already full-fledged when he was in college (McDermott, foreword).
After college, in 1953, Gorey’s friendship with two Doubleday editors, Barbara Zimmerman and Jason Epstein (author of The Book Business) got him a job in the art department of Doubleday Books in New York. He had visited New York in 1952, where he drew a few book covers for them, and they wanted him to stay (Ascending, p. 232). For seven years, he designed, lettered, and illustrated books for the Anchor imprint (Theroux, p. 26). (I’ve occasionally come across some of these Gorey-illustrated books in used book stores, including a copy of Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida.) He meanwhile made time to write his own books, and a (now long dead) publishing company called Duell, Sloan & Pearce published the first two, The Unstrung Harp and The Listing Attic (Ascending, p.27).
A major part of Gorey’s work during his time at Doubleday (1953-1960) was making paste-ups (Ascending, p. 233). Nowadays pages are designed in computer programs such as InDesign, QuarkXPress, and PageMaker, but back then it was done by hand. The designer literally glued text and images on a piece of cardboard to indicate where it would be positioned on the page; the whole purpose was to show where everything, including illustrations and headings, went in the book (Lee, pp. 176-7).
At Doubleday, he was promoted from making paste-ups to illustrating and designing covers. The first was for Andre Gide’s book Lafcadio’s Adventures, followed by a picture of the Globe Theater for the cover of a book about Shakespeare (Ascending, p. 233). The people in charge liked his hand lettering (although he didn’t), so he ended up typically using his distinctive hand-lettered style on many covers. Even for his own books, people insisted that he hand-letter, so he stuck with that; besides, he thought it was easier than type (Ascending, pp. 233-4).
While his own books were almost always black and white, his Doubleday paperbacks often had some muted colors. The policy with Doubleday was to use three colors in addition to black, and Gorey preferred less bright colors, such as olive and lavender (Ascending, p. 235).
Gorey left Doubleday to collaborate with Jason Epstein and Celia Carroll on a small publishing company called The Looking-Glass Library. This was children’s books made of “paper over boards” (Ascending, p. 236) and largely included near-forgotten nineteen-century literature. Gorey worked as the art director and illustrator; he also helped with acquisitions (Ascending, p. 237). Epstein lost interest after a couple years, and Looking-Glass Books folded. Meanwhile, Gorey did some freelance for Vintage, another publisher of paperbacks, and in 1963 was the art director for a publishing company called Bobbs Merrill, where he was among many who were fired. But he had so much freelance work to do that he didn’t have time for job hunting (Ascending, p. 237).
Even after he was no longer a regular designer and illustrator of book covers, he continued to illustrate books when hired to do so (Ascending, p. 238). That is why I’ve come across the occasional anthology of plays or stories with cover art that has Gorey’s distinct style, and why I even have a special Gorey-illustrated edition of Dracula, published by Barnes and Noble in the 1990s.
Freelancing
Books that Gorey not only designed and illustrated but also wrote himself are highly recognizable by his unique style. His trademarks are extremely tall, slender people wearing costumes from between the 1890s and the 1920s; strange lurking monsters; whimsical, smiling cats; interior scenes with wallpaper, paneling, urns, and elegantly draped curtains; and somewhat barren landscapes. His style is compulsively detailed with hatching and regular patterns galore.
During the 1950s and 60s, Gorey had trouble getting some of his unsettling books published. This was particularly the case with The Beastly Baby, which was too disturbing and warped a subject for any publisher to touch at the time, so finally Gorey decided to self-publish it, a total of two hundred copies (Theroux, p. 27). Thus he started Fantod Press.
Gorey’s studio in his Cape Cod house included a small wooden work table on which sat many bottles of ink and pens, a couple of metal frogs (one of which had a mouthful of paintbrushes), and a Figbash mug full of bookmarks. He tolerated his cats jumping on the table and leaving inky paw prints on a drawing (McDermott, “The Studio”). His main drawing materials consisted of paper and ink:
“As to materials, virtually everything is done on Strathmore two-ply matt finish. For years I used Hunt #204 penpoints and Higgins India ink; somewhere along the line I switched to Gillotts titquill penpoints and Pelikan ink. When Gillotts titquills disappeared, I went with reluctance back to Hunt #104 (Ascending, pp. 86, 88).”
He occasionally used watercolors, but even then he first drew the image. He rarely used actual models and mostly took images freely; he had to look at pictures of old cars, for instance, in order to draw an automobile, and he relied heavily on Dover books (Ascending, pp. 89-90). Gorey said in an interview:
All my drawings are done to the size of reproduction, the only exception being when the final result is going to be more than, say, six inches in any direction, then I work smaller and have it blown up, because I am uncomfortable working any larger unless I absolutely have to.
I correct drawings only in a very minor way—with white tempera and/or a razor blade. In desperation I may redraw a segment and paste it over if I feel unable to redo the rest of the drawing as well a second time (Ascending, p. 89).
Gorey always completed the text before illustrating it, and all the drawings of one book typically took a month or two. Sometimes he didn’t start the illustrations until ten years after he wrote the text, and it could be years before he completed the illustrations (Ross, p. 22). Books about Gorey’s art are sprinkled with sketches and notes for his work; he created rough, basic sketches before working on the final inked images. To draw one of his detailed images took a day or two (Ascending, p. 32). In the 1990s, he bought a Mac and took classes on Adobe Photoshop and illustrator…only to discover that his drawing style didn’t suit this technology, so he gave up on it (McDermott, “The Library.”)
The publisher of The Listing Attic admired his hand-lettering when he showed samples, and that is how he ended up hand-lettering his work, even though he thought it looked bad (Ascending, p. 90). Despite this aversion, he continued to hand-letter his books and covers for the rest of his life, apparently out of habit.
Gorey came up with stories and wrote them first, before he started drawing. In interviews, he mentioned having a great many—fifty to seventy-five—books written out but not yet illustrated. (Now that he’s dead, I wonder if he ever finished all those books, or whether at least some of them will be published without the illustrations; some were used for productions of plays that Gorey worked on in the 1980s and 90s.) Although his books are short on words and dominated by his illustrations, he thought of himself first and foremost as a writer (Ascending, p. 21).
Gorey’s books include some novelties such as pop-up books and tiny, unusual flip-books. He wrote (under pseudonyms that are acronyms of his real name) flip-books like The Floating Elephant, which when turned backward, is The Dancing Rock. One way, the book illustrates a little elephant floating skyward, and the other way it illustrates a moving boulder (Theroux, p. 65). This two-in-one flipbook was published in the 1990s, and when out of curiosity I looked up The Floating Elephant on Amazon, I discovered that it sells used for between $100 and $350. Another of Gorey’s flipbooks, Figbash Acrobate, is available on Amazon for either $200 or $475.
Influences
Nineteenth-century book illustrations, which were engravings made from steel or wood, heavily influenced Gorey’s illustrations. Lewis Carroll and his illustrator John Tenniel are thought to have influenced Gorey, and his work certainly reminds me of that pair; some people also think Edward Lear influenced his work. But it’s more general than that, although he was an avid fan of both Carroll and Lear (Ascending, p. 21).
Gorey’s favorite authors were Jane Austen and Lady Murasaki (the Japanese author of The Tales of Genji, the world’s first novel). He said, “I’m very fond of Japanese and Chinese literature. I like to work in that way, leaving things out, being very brief,” and he mentioned Ronald Firbank, Samuel Becket, and Jorge Luis Borges but wasn’t entirely sure “influences” was the right word for them (Ascending, pp. 22-3). Japanese art had some influence on his work; in particular, his ocean waves in Lear’s The Dong with the Luminous Nose look strikingly like those in Katsushiki Hokusai’s painting The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (Ross, p. 90).
Gorey was also influenced by art that was neither illustration nor literature. He was an avid fan of Louis Feuillade, who created silent films such as Fantomas, Les Vampires, Tih Minh, and Barrabas. In Elegant Enigmas, Karen Wilkin’s description of Feuillade’s films proves that Gorey’s artwork is heavily influenced by them, since the films involve:
women in long dresses and enormous hats with plumes, and men with magnificent moustaches wearing top hats and frock coats, all playing out mysterious dramas in pompously furnished interiors, long corridors with multiple doors, and outdoor settings with rows of iron railings (Elegant, p. 16).
Gorey was fascinated by the choreography of Georges Ballantine, though he was uncertain how this influenced his own art, other than writing a couple of little books about ballet dancers. Looking at books that he both wrote and illustrated, I can see how his enthusiasm for ballet, for film, and for theater affected his work: each square or rectangular image resembles a stage set; the figures pose like ballet dancers; the images together progress like melodramatic silent films.
Conclusion
Edward Gorey’s artistic style is truly unique and easy to recognize across a bookstore. While his work is so unique and distinctive, it was also influenced by a variety of art. Often this influence was extremely subtle, such as something vague about the tone of one of his little books. All art is somewhat derivative, including Gorey’s, but at the same time his work manages to be truly original. He has inspired fans worldwide—undoubtedly he has influenced filmmaker Tim Burton—and will continue to pique the interest of other artists and writers, just as nineteenth-century illustrators like John Tenniel did for him. His interiors, urns, cats, and Edwardian people have become iconic.
Bibliography
Edward Gorey House Museum, http://www.edwardgoreyhouse.org/, accessed 3/5/11.
Marshall. Bookmaking: Editing/Design/Production, 3rd Ed. W. W. Norton & Company, NY: 2004.
Marci and Deth, “Edward Gorey Doubleday Anchor Paperbacks,” http://www.flickr.com /photos/marcianddeth/sets/72157623465700599/detail/?page=4, accessed 3/2/11. (This is the source of all Doubleday cover images in this essay.)
McDermott, Kevin, photos and text. John Updike, foreword. Elephant House: or, The Home of Edward Gorey. Pomegranate, San Francisco: 2003. (No page numbers)
Ross, Clifford, and Karen Wilkin. The World of Edward Gorey. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., NY: 1996.
Sullivan, James. “From the Cape, a View of Edward Gorey,” Boston Globe, http://www.boston.com /ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/02/06/figuring_out_why_edward_gorey_liked_what_he_liked/?page=2, accessed 3/2/11.
Theroux, Alexander. The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Fantagraphics Books, Inc., Seattle: 2011.
Wilkin, Karen, Selected and Edited by. Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey. Harcourt, Inc., NY: 2001.
Wilkin, Karen. Elegant Enigmas: the Art of Edward Gorey. Pomegranate, San Francisco: 2009.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Ooligan Press in the News
The news lately has been hopping with Ooligan Press:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/46522-ooligan-press-jeopardized-by-state-budget-crisis.html
http://portland.readinglocal.com/2011/03/25/5-reasons-why-portland-is-the-best-place-to-start-a-small-press/
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf/2011/03/grads_of_ooligan_press_are_up.html
Shelf Awareness’s review of Rethinking Paper and Ink, including comments on Ooligan Press:
http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=1420#m11785
Here’s a bit on the PSU homepage about a children’s picture book Ooligan Press worked on:
http://vimeo.com/20940160
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/46522-ooligan-press-jeopardized-by-state-budget-crisis.html
http://portland.readinglocal.com/2011/03/25/5-reasons-why-portland-is-the-best-place-to-start-a-small-press/
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf/2011/03/grads_of_ooligan_press_are_up.html
Shelf Awareness’s review of Rethinking Paper and Ink, including comments on Ooligan Press:
http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=1420#m11785
Here’s a bit on the PSU homepage about a children’s picture book Ooligan Press worked on:
http://vimeo.com/20940160
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Thus, Not Thusly
I can’t believe I’m reading a book that uses the “word” thusly. I realize it’s an academic book, but “academic” does not mean you have to use pompous pseudo-words. When I came to thusly, I stopped and reread the sentence a couple times. I imagined the sentence with thus instead of thusly and saw no reason whatsoever to not simply say thus. Finally, I looked thusly up in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which says:
thusly (adv.) Thusly—a word I picked up in Massachusetts and will give this single outing—if you are in that South Atlantic coaling station [etc.]—C. Freud in The Times (3 Aug. 1989). The word seemed out of order to me, since thus by itself would have sufficed. But its naturalness is more or less unquestioned in AmE (it was first recording in the OED in an American source of 1865), and a string of examples lie in the Merriam Webster files. Their usage guide (1989) declares that ‘thusly is not now merely an ignorant or comic substitute for thus: it is a distinct adverb that is used in a distinct way in standard speech and writing.’ Clement Freud’s ‘single outing’ for the word suggests that it has not been washed ashore in the UK yet (p. 782).
My suspicions were confirmed: don’t use thusly! If I owned a copy of Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies, I’d look it up in that book, too, just for entertainment.
thusly (adv.) Thusly—a word I picked up in Massachusetts and will give this single outing—if you are in that South Atlantic coaling station [etc.]—C. Freud in The Times (3 Aug. 1989). The word seemed out of order to me, since thus by itself would have sufficed. But its naturalness is more or less unquestioned in AmE (it was first recording in the OED in an American source of 1865), and a string of examples lie in the Merriam Webster files. Their usage guide (1989) declares that ‘thusly is not now merely an ignorant or comic substitute for thus: it is a distinct adverb that is used in a distinct way in standard speech and writing.’ Clement Freud’s ‘single outing’ for the word suggests that it has not been washed ashore in the UK yet (p. 782).
My suspicions were confirmed: don’t use thusly! If I owned a copy of Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies, I’d look it up in that book, too, just for entertainment.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Extreme Misogyny
The topic for my final paper for Book Design is Edward Gorey. I thought I could write a paper and read books about a white male artist & writer without colluding with patriarchy and misogyny, but I’m not so sure now that I’ve come across the following lines in the book The Strange Case of Edward Gorey by Alexander Theroux:
…things that Gorey could not stand:…extreme feminism (“Women poets? Who needs this kind of anthology?”) (p. 121).
Here’s something I can’t stand: extreme misogyny, which unlike “extreme feminism” really does exist and is ever-present in toxic, patriarchal society. Since the ultimate purpose of feminism is to overthrow the ultimate evil, this oppressive and violent societal system called patriarchy—a. k. a. dominator society—there is of course no such thing as “extreme” feminism.
What could possibly be “extreme” about an anthology that acknowledges and honors women writers, in a society that is customarily dismissive toward women writers and where an anthology has to have the word “women” in the title in order to not be packed full of samples by almost all white male authors?! Oh how dare we threaten your white male egos!
Not only has Alexander Theroux ensured that I never read anything by him again, but he has also disillusioned me about Edward Gorey. I don’t expect people to be perfect, but misogynists aren’t worth my spit. I suppose I should simple take a breath and acknowledge that I can admire Edward Gorey’s art despite this. Reading about what a curmudgeonly recluse he was, I suspected that he had no grasp of interconnectedness, but this certainly confirms it in the worst way.
I’m not saying I should completely avoid art and literature by white males; I know that white male feminists exist (such as John Stoltenberg), but this experience rather makes me think I shouldn’t study up on an artist unless I know beforehand that the artist is a feminist. Exposure to misogyny and patriarchy makes me feel unclean and deeply alienated. This exposure can be, as in this case, in the form of a book I happen to be reading. Since moving to Portland, a progressive city, I have less exposure to a white male supremacist perspective, but it’s impossible to completely avoid it in present-day America. Since I have had so much exposure to patriarchy without seeking it (especially before I moved to Portland), it hardly makes sense for me to choose patriarchal books to read.
Ever since I “woke up” in college so many years ago, I have had little patience for books and people who see the world from a patriarchal perspective. Many of them eagerly gobble up patriarchy as though it were made of dark chocolate-covered raspberries while they simultaneously are, in a way, oblivious to patriarchy’s existence. Or rather, they are oblivious to the fact that patriarchy is not the only option. At the age of four, I first became aware of boys’ completely inexplicable delusions of superiority over girls; with this in mind, it sometimes amazes me that so few people get it.
Fortunately, I have a capacious and "extremely" (or should I say truly) feminist private library. I’m in the mood to pull a very different book off the shelf, such as The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
Later...
After writing the above, it occurs to me that maybe I shouldn’t assume that Alexander Theroux interpreted Gorey’s behavior correctly; certainly when I look at The Penguin Book of Women Poets I’m disgusted at how thin it is given the subject matter, and I believe it should be at least a hundred volumes. It’s hard to say. On one hand, Gorey was gender-bending in his choice of clothes and excess jewelry, and his favorite authors were Jane Austen and Lady Murasaki, and he was close friends with Violet Ranney (Bunny) Lang, who was apparently an eccentric feminist. On the other hand, Gorey was a white male who was born in 1925, and he was a curmudgeonly recluse (somewhat reminiscent, in lifestyle, of my extremely misogynistic and racist pack rat Uncle Buddy) who embraced individuality and clearly didn’t embrace interconnectedness.
…things that Gorey could not stand:…extreme feminism (“Women poets? Who needs this kind of anthology?”) (p. 121).
Here’s something I can’t stand: extreme misogyny, which unlike “extreme feminism” really does exist and is ever-present in toxic, patriarchal society. Since the ultimate purpose of feminism is to overthrow the ultimate evil, this oppressive and violent societal system called patriarchy—a. k. a. dominator society—there is of course no such thing as “extreme” feminism.
What could possibly be “extreme” about an anthology that acknowledges and honors women writers, in a society that is customarily dismissive toward women writers and where an anthology has to have the word “women” in the title in order to not be packed full of samples by almost all white male authors?! Oh how dare we threaten your white male egos!
Not only has Alexander Theroux ensured that I never read anything by him again, but he has also disillusioned me about Edward Gorey. I don’t expect people to be perfect, but misogynists aren’t worth my spit. I suppose I should simple take a breath and acknowledge that I can admire Edward Gorey’s art despite this. Reading about what a curmudgeonly recluse he was, I suspected that he had no grasp of interconnectedness, but this certainly confirms it in the worst way.
I’m not saying I should completely avoid art and literature by white males; I know that white male feminists exist (such as John Stoltenberg), but this experience rather makes me think I shouldn’t study up on an artist unless I know beforehand that the artist is a feminist. Exposure to misogyny and patriarchy makes me feel unclean and deeply alienated. This exposure can be, as in this case, in the form of a book I happen to be reading. Since moving to Portland, a progressive city, I have less exposure to a white male supremacist perspective, but it’s impossible to completely avoid it in present-day America. Since I have had so much exposure to patriarchy without seeking it (especially before I moved to Portland), it hardly makes sense for me to choose patriarchal books to read.
Ever since I “woke up” in college so many years ago, I have had little patience for books and people who see the world from a patriarchal perspective. Many of them eagerly gobble up patriarchy as though it were made of dark chocolate-covered raspberries while they simultaneously are, in a way, oblivious to patriarchy’s existence. Or rather, they are oblivious to the fact that patriarchy is not the only option. At the age of four, I first became aware of boys’ completely inexplicable delusions of superiority over girls; with this in mind, it sometimes amazes me that so few people get it.
Fortunately, I have a capacious and "extremely" (or should I say truly) feminist private library. I’m in the mood to pull a very different book off the shelf, such as The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
Later...
After writing the above, it occurs to me that maybe I shouldn’t assume that Alexander Theroux interpreted Gorey’s behavior correctly; certainly when I look at The Penguin Book of Women Poets I’m disgusted at how thin it is given the subject matter, and I believe it should be at least a hundred volumes. It’s hard to say. On one hand, Gorey was gender-bending in his choice of clothes and excess jewelry, and his favorite authors were Jane Austen and Lady Murasaki, and he was close friends with Violet Ranney (Bunny) Lang, who was apparently an eccentric feminist. On the other hand, Gorey was a white male who was born in 1925, and he was a curmudgeonly recluse (somewhat reminiscent, in lifestyle, of my extremely misogynistic and racist pack rat Uncle Buddy) who embraced individuality and clearly didn’t embrace interconnectedness.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
As if the federal government doesn't do enough harm, now it wants to stop funding the NEA.
Americans for the Arts has an online letter in which you can make your own comments before sending it to your representative. Here's the url:
http://www.capwiz.com/artsusa/mailapp/
Here is my letter to my representative:
As your constituent, I urge you to vote against the completely insane and barbaric amendments to H.R. 1 (Full-Year CR) offered by Rep. Walberg (MI) and Rep. Garrett (NJ) that seek to reduce funds or terminate funding to the National Endowment for the Arts.
It's hard enough to survive in this toxic, patriarchal, destructive society that values destruction, greed, and cruelty and doesn't value artistic creativity, spirituality, and healing, without the government taking away funding for the arts. The federal government should take away funding for its evil wars--stop wasting 60% of the national budget on the military and war--and start using it on meaningful and important things: education, healthcare (including women's reproductive healthcare, NOT excluding it), and the arts.
As someone who is absolutely brimming with artistic creativity and has many ideas for novels and stories, I know too well what it's like to be cornered into meaningless, thankless, and humiliating jobs that I hate--all because I have to pay the bills. Yes, artists exist and need to thrive by creating art, not by being frustrated by an evil toxic society that doesn't acknowledge our existence.
http://www.capwiz.com/artsusa/mailapp/
Here is my letter to my representative:
As your constituent, I urge you to vote against the completely insane and barbaric amendments to H.R. 1 (Full-Year CR) offered by Rep. Walberg (MI) and Rep. Garrett (NJ) that seek to reduce funds or terminate funding to the National Endowment for the Arts.
It's hard enough to survive in this toxic, patriarchal, destructive society that values destruction, greed, and cruelty and doesn't value artistic creativity, spirituality, and healing, without the government taking away funding for the arts. The federal government should take away funding for its evil wars--stop wasting 60% of the national budget on the military and war--and start using it on meaningful and important things: education, healthcare (including women's reproductive healthcare, NOT excluding it), and the arts.
As someone who is absolutely brimming with artistic creativity and has many ideas for novels and stories, I know too well what it's like to be cornered into meaningless, thankless, and humiliating jobs that I hate--all because I have to pay the bills. Yes, artists exist and need to thrive by creating art, not by being frustrated by an evil toxic society that doesn't acknowledge our existence.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Indexing
I just created my first index, and while I felt intimidated before starting the project, it turned out to be fun and creative. Indexing is creative in that you choose which words you think need to be in the index, which words people are likely to look up. You also get to choose the subheadings and decide how you want to arrange all these words.
Before starting your first index, I highly recommend reading Nancy C. Mulvany’s book Indexing Books and the entire Indexing chapter of the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. You will go from having scarcely any idea how to index books, to knowing all about it. It’s also good to keep these two books handy while you’re indexing and to double check with them even after you’ve gotten far along with the index.
When I indexed Rethinking Paper and Ink, I read the Word document of the manuscript and, as I went along, picked out any words or phrases that I thought belonged in the index. I copied and pasted them into a new document, in one column. During this process, I put the page numbers after the index terms, and whenever I came across one of the words or phrases on another page, I added that page number. (Ultimately the page numbers would change because the document would be imported to InDesign and get shifted around.) When a potential subheading occurred to me, I put it in parentheses after the page numbers.
After I reached the end of the manuscript, I turned to the document I had created. I put spaces between each index word and began to sort out entries while occasionally looking things up in my two reference books. I took the sections that were in parenthesis and put them in lines below the index word and indented. I capitalized the S in what “See”’s I had written, and changed every “See also” and “See” to italic.
The next step was cutting down the number of page numbers after words followed by more than five numbers. I found the locations in the book and read them in context: what aspect of so-and-so was described on this particular page? Under these circumstances, I was able to make many subheadings.
After not touching the index for several days, I edited it from beginning to end, catching any “See also” that didn’t have a capitalized S and any entry that had more than five locators (page numbers or grouping of page numbers). In some instances, I removed subheadings because fewer than five locators were under the main heading and/or because the subheading indicated a page number that was redundant with a number under the main heading. During a later edit, I thought a few subheadings were simply not necessary, not something anyone was likely to look up, so I deleted them. After looking back over Indexing Books, I took subheadings and also made them main headings, as the book recommended.
Whether or not your index gets formatted in InDesign, it may ultimately be formatted differently than the original version, in which case the page numbers will change. For this index, I came up with numbers in brackets to represent each index term or phrase. I put the bracketed number at the location in the manuscript and after the term or phrase in the index. After the index is reformatted, then you replace the bracketed numbers with the ultimate page numbers and remove the bracketed numbers from the text.
Before starting your first index, I highly recommend reading Nancy C. Mulvany’s book Indexing Books and the entire Indexing chapter of the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. You will go from having scarcely any idea how to index books, to knowing all about it. It’s also good to keep these two books handy while you’re indexing and to double check with them even after you’ve gotten far along with the index.
When I indexed Rethinking Paper and Ink, I read the Word document of the manuscript and, as I went along, picked out any words or phrases that I thought belonged in the index. I copied and pasted them into a new document, in one column. During this process, I put the page numbers after the index terms, and whenever I came across one of the words or phrases on another page, I added that page number. (Ultimately the page numbers would change because the document would be imported to InDesign and get shifted around.) When a potential subheading occurred to me, I put it in parentheses after the page numbers.
After I reached the end of the manuscript, I turned to the document I had created. I put spaces between each index word and began to sort out entries while occasionally looking things up in my two reference books. I took the sections that were in parenthesis and put them in lines below the index word and indented. I capitalized the S in what “See”’s I had written, and changed every “See also” and “See” to italic.
The next step was cutting down the number of page numbers after words followed by more than five numbers. I found the locations in the book and read them in context: what aspect of so-and-so was described on this particular page? Under these circumstances, I was able to make many subheadings.
After not touching the index for several days, I edited it from beginning to end, catching any “See also” that didn’t have a capitalized S and any entry that had more than five locators (page numbers or grouping of page numbers). In some instances, I removed subheadings because fewer than five locators were under the main heading and/or because the subheading indicated a page number that was redundant with a number under the main heading. During a later edit, I thought a few subheadings were simply not necessary, not something anyone was likely to look up, so I deleted them. After looking back over Indexing Books, I took subheadings and also made them main headings, as the book recommended.
Whether or not your index gets formatted in InDesign, it may ultimately be formatted differently than the original version, in which case the page numbers will change. For this index, I came up with numbers in brackets to represent each index term or phrase. I put the bracketed number at the location in the manuscript and after the term or phrase in the index. After the index is reformatted, then you replace the bracketed numbers with the ultimate page numbers and remove the bracketed numbers from the text.
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