Black and grey not working.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if those words are they wrong words? How strict are you about images depicting what was in the text? Here are a few people have noticed over the years from the Bellairs Corpus:- “[Lewis] also felt comforted by the two wizards, whose warm friendly bodies pressed against his in the furry darkness” makes it sound as if he sat between his uncle and Mrs. Zimmermann in their afterhours drive around Capharnaum County featured in The House with a Clock in its Walls (1973) – yet the illustration shows him in the passenger seat and Mrs. Zimmermann in the middle.
- On the base of the statue Johnny Dixon finds in the Glomus estate, near the conclusion of The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt (1983), “a name was carved...a name he knew from history books.” Yet the image on the cover of the same statue does not feature the name Godfrey de Bouillon.
- Johnny Dixon’s nightmare at the beginning of The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost features three separate stained-glass windows – yet the rear dust-jacket art shows the figures in one window.
- In Fergie’s dream “he saw that the bell had no rope or clapper—and yet” ... and yet the cover of The Bell, the Book, and the Spellbinder (1997) shows a bell with a clapper.
- The cover of The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost (2003) shows Lewis Barnavelt wearing glasses – something he is not known to do.
I’m sure there are more – and I’m sure it’s not something regulated to these books. But back to the original question: does it bother you at all, or are you irked on some level? Do you consider small mistakes - such as the order of where people sit in the front of a car – mostly irrelevant verses something more substantial?
I would say that I find things like this annoying, but not to any great degree. Some illustrators seem to take great pains to match their illustrations to the author's words, and others do not bother to even read any of the book. I think the examples you mention fall somewhere in between these two. I have to assume that Gorey read the passage, but he did not carefully reread the passage before doing his illustration. One of the illustrators that I collect is Robert Lawson, and I remember reading an article he wrote on the subject. Lawson took great pains to try to get the illustration to match the words in the book, but also to be sure that it was historically and otherwise correct. In his article he mentions how an editor wanted him to illustrate a story dealing with the dead, but not to make them frightening or gruesome. Something that he was not sure how to do. Lawson mentioned how he would look in magazines for different things that he might find useful for future illustrations, like the grill of a certain car, or the outfit of a 16th century French soldier. He mentioned how the illustrator never knew what his next commission might require him to draw.
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