O Sordid Type: Edward Gorey's Art of Lettering

Edward Gorey House: Throughout his half-century career as a book artist and illustrator, Edward Gorey mined the expressive potential to be found in the world of fonts and letterforms. His evocation of past eras manifested itself not only in his close attention to the nuances of period dress and décor, but in his attention to typography as well.

Actually, we can’t technically refer to his lettering work as typography at all – that term connotes a body of letterforms mechanically or digitally assembled. Gorey instead created all of the text in his books by hand, utilizing a vast inventory of lettering styles. Gorey certainly knew the craft of typography and typesetting – he made his living at it during his tenures at various nine-to-five publishing jobs in New York City where his duties included not just illustration and art direction, but typography as well.

From the frequently audacious hand-lettering created for the Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge and hundreds of commercial assignments to the whimsy of his self-authored works and his later Cape “Entertainments” and broadsides, O Sordid Type: Edward Gorey’s Art of Lettering offers a deep dive into the calligraphic and typographical experiments of Edward Gorey. Really, we should restate here: every piece of text in an Edward Gorey book is hand-lettered—even his minuscule text drawn in the copyright pages of his miniature books. The only exception (and a notable one) is his first book from 1953, The Unstrung Harp whose publishers (Duell, Sloan, & Pearce) felt required typesetting. To be fair, The Unstrung Harp is by far his wordiest book and to correct this anomaly, Gorey painstakingly re-lettered all the book’s text by hand when it was reprinted in his first anthology Amphigorey in 1972. We would very much like to ask him how long that took.

Hand-lettered type is rarely mistaken for set type, so while generally suggesting a genteel 19th-century sensibility, the irregularities of Gorey’s hand-lettering imbue his works with a decidedly louche nature. Gorey wants you to notice this – or at least have it subliminally register as suspect. This dovetails nicely with his general undermining of most aristocratic proprieties with compelling intimations of lurid acts, random violence, inexplicable madness, and casual despair.

As if evoking the shabbier and somewhat unsavory typesetting houses clustered along the disreputable backstreets of East Mortshire (not a real thing/not a real place), Gorey’s lettering style becomes a de facto voice just as much as the text itself: a formalized Victorian/Edwardian cadence that speaks sweetly and conceals venal undertones. It’s that corrupt nature of Gorey’s lettering that creates his unmistakable off-centeredness and adds malevolent tension to his storytelling. Edward joyfully refers to it all as Sinister Cozy – and so do we.