Picture Book I’m Least Surprised Has Not Been Reprinted by a Mainstream Children’s Press

The Dong with a Luminous Nose has text by Edward Lear and pictures by Edward Gorey. Originally issued by Young Scott Books in 1969, it is now available only from Pomegranate Communications, a specialist in “art, nature, and women’s studies, as well as culture, music, and photography.”

Pomegranate has good sales into museum gift shops, which I suspect is where The Dong with a Luminous Nose finds readers for its tale:

Happily, happily passed those days!
While the cheerful Jumblies staid;
They danced in circlets all night long,
To the plaintive pipe of the lively Dong,
In moonlight, shine, or shade. . . .

And those who watch at that midnight hour
From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,
Cry, as the wild light passes along,
“The Dong! – the Dong!
“The wandering Dong through the forest goes!
“The Dong! The Dong!
“The Dong with the luminous nose!”

For added marketing challenge, the text also includes mention of a “Bong-tree.”

I used to work for a publishing firm that had once owned Young Scott Books. We occasionally got inquiries about its titles, but not this one. A shame.

The Gorey Enigma

Yesterday I visited the exhibit “Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey,” at the Boston Athenaeum. It was at once familiar and strange, which seems appropriate.

For the familiar, I’ve written before about how I first saw Gorey’s work at a young age, and recognized his distinct style the covers of what seemed like perfectly acceptable books. As a result, I didn’t realize that he’d been a “cult figure” until years later.

One reason Gorey was so recognizable is that his drawing style was very consistent through his career. Envelopes he decorated while he was a Harvard student in 1948 are immediately recognizable as his work and no one else’s. They look very much like the drawings for The Unstrung Harp, his debut book from 1953, which in turn look quite like the illustrations in his posthumously published books four decades later. Perhaps connoisseurs know the hallmarks of “early Gorey,” “high Gorey,” and “late Gorey,” but I couldn’t have sorted the items in time without the labels.

A more surprising source of familiarity is that Gorey drew at the same size as his drawings were printed. (I measured a sketch from The Hapless Child against the images in a printed edition to be sure.) All those thin lines, that intricate hatching and cross-hatching, that hand-lettering, was done in “real space.”

I spotted only one drawing with remnant pencil lines (aside from those used for positioning). There are several examples of paste-on additions, but relatively little painting over unwanted marks with white.

The exhibit includes some sketches in a looser style as Gorey worked out ideas, experimented with layouts, or sketched for the theater. Also on display are some manuscript pages, showing him at work on his verse. “The Osbick Bird,” for instance, is typed as “The Something Bird” while Gorey tried to think of the best nonsense word, and a preliminary sketch uses the Carrollian “Jubjub Bird.”

I would have liked to see more items showing how Gorey produced his drawings: intermediary or unfinished examples, art tools, video of him at work. But what was on display was delightful enough.

Fur Coats on Sale, Size Extra Large

I remember being surprised to read in my teens that Edward Gorey was a “cult figure.” That was probably around the time WGBH commissioned him to create the animated opening credits for Mystery.

That news came years after I’d read Amphigorey or some of Gorey’s smaller books from (as I recall) the library of the college where my father taught. They appeared to be in comics form, so they had to be okay for little kids, right? I also spotted Gorey’s distinctive art on the covers of John Bellairs’s novels.

Sure, I’d realized early on that Gorey’s sense of humor wasn’t to everyone’s tastes, and his sense of taste not to everyone’s humor. But the notion that he had inspired a cult—i.e., a small set of people who feel superior for admiring Edward Gorey—struck me as odd. Wasn’t he just another illustrator who’d always been around?

I puzzled over that moment when I heard from associates of Bloomsbury Auctions that it will sell some items from Gorey’s estate. The auction house’s press release says:

Edward Gorey was one of the most conspicuous eccentrics in New York City of the latter 2oth Century. His strange, meticulous and often hilariously macabre drawings drew a cult [there’s that word] following around the world until the 1977 Tony Award-winning revival of Dracula (that he designed) put Gorey himself in the spotlight. For nearly two decades he could be spotted almost every night at Lincoln Center while New York City Ballet was in town by his opulent beard, tennis shoes and an enormous fur coat. . . .

In the 1980s, Gorey had a change of heart. He became an advocate for animal rights and put his fur coats in storage. He never wore them again.

Bloomsbury Auctions will offer fourteen of Gorey’s coats and other personal effects and collected items on Thursday, 9 December. Some of the proceeds will go to the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust to benefit animal welfare. Here’s the online catalogue, or visit Monica Edinger’s posting.

Robin Tweets for the Week

I’m busy at a conference this weekend, so this weekly Robin consists of some links, most already shared on that Twitter feed.

First, in the thumbnail at left, artist Carly Monardo shares her vision of Robin as he’d look if designed and drawn by Edward Gorey. Her Batman may be even more Gorey than that. Each entry in Monardo’s blog is an attempt to draw an iconic character in an unfamiliar artistic style.

Comics Should Be Good! rightly featured Chuck Dixon and Jason Armstrong’s 1995 retelling of how Dick Grayson became Robin in Robin Annual, #4.

Comics Make No Sense demonstrates the dangers of fighting crime in the vicinity of a giant sewing machine, especially if you fall down a lot.

The Speed Force highlighted the moment in Young Justice, written by Peter David and drawn by Todd Nauck, when some of Tim Drake’s teammates realize just how much they resent him.

Finally, here’s an image of Robin as a member of The Breakfast Club, created by artist Cliff Chiang. (Despite being a “child of the ’80s” I’ve never watched more than five minutes of that movie or felt any desire to. So I can’t say if Robin makes sense in the Ally Sheedy position.)