Goreyesque Tinies
In the late 70s, as a wee lad, I was rummaging through a closet off of our basement rec room and I found this most glorious book. I still have it. My mother’s name is written on the first page. It’s rather beat up today, and I have no recollection of the condition in which I found it, but I have done my best to preserve it over the years. It is easily one of my most prized possessions and I’ve even since bought a second hand “reading copy” so as to not further its deterioration.
The book is Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural from 1968. It is a collection edited by Henry Mazzeo and counts amounts its authors H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, and M. R. James. That’s a lot of first and middle initials!
Besides the amazing authors between its covers, this book also featured the artwork of Edward Gorey. He created the art for the covers as well as the frontispieces for each story – seventeen in total. On finding this book as a boy, I was mesmerized by the imagery.
Each frontispiece in Hauntings features 2-4 vignettes from the stories. The cover is a love letter to apparitions caught in the corner one’s eye, told in seventeen parts. Writing that, I only just now realized that the number of illustrations, displayed in a rigid grid on the book sleeve, matches the number of stories. Even today this book is surprising me.
Today the world knows of Edward Gorey. As a child, I don’t have any idea what the world might have known of him. I’m quite certain that the Gashlycrumb Tinies, arguably has most well known work, was not in the zeitgeist let alone tattooed on the upper backs of raven-haired twenty-somethings. All I knew was, I found something magical in a box in a closet and it would never leave my possession.
Later, in a pre-college course I took at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I would peruse the school’s library for any work by Gorey. For an assignment where we were asked to prepare and present on our favorite illustrators, I showed off spreads from a National Lampoon interview.
Even though Gorey was an outstanding writer and poet, he was the master of letting images suggest rather than force a story down your throat. The quote he is famous for, his “Simple Theory of Art”, is this:
“anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.”
There are seventeen outstanding examples of this principle on the cover of Hauntings that I return to several times a year. Seventeen ghosts, seemingly all female, in various environments. On the surface: spooky. The “something else” is, well, fucking everything. I challenge you to consider any single one of the 1.75″ x 3″ cover vignettes without assembling your own backstory.
Most of Gorey’s work is done with pen and ink. These illustrations stand out as being mostly ink wash with some line work. I have combed through his collected works trying to find ghosts with the same spectral quality as these little phantoms and very few examples exist. The subtle grey tones of ink wash, with extremely minimal but carefully constructed details, simply deliver that ghostly quality more effectively than black makes on paper.
It was my wife who suggested that I create some small art pieces in the style of Edward Gorey. She went so far as to refer to them as “Tinies” and I added “Goreyesque” to that. My goal with these pieces is to capture both the spirit and the “spirit” of the ghost illustrations from the cover of Hauntings as one of my earliest influences and loves. I’ll let the audience decide if I have been successful or not.
One more fun fact about the cover of Hauntings: In 2002 the cartoonist Seth used a suspiciously similar format for the cover of his graphic novel It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken. Am I the only person to notice this? Hard to say. I would also argue that the “Lot 29” on Seth’s cover is a subtle nod to Doyle’s “Lot 249” in Hauntings.
References
Popova, Maria. “Edward Gorey’s Never-Before-Seen Letters and Illustrated Envelopes.” The Marginalian, 15 September 2011, https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/09/15/floating-world-edward-gorey-letters/.
Hauntings: Tales of the Supernatural on Archive.org