I'm a long-time fan of Gorey, but had no idea about his long career designing books for other authors. I feel I ought to have realised—his John Bellairs' covers are so obviously his—but somehow I failed to make the mental leap. And as I pored through the book, I noticed cover after cover of book that I'd owned, or read—Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, or deCoulange's The Ancient City, where the cover is really the only thing I remember about it, but I would never have known they were his.

The short text at the beginning is adequate, but a fuller volume with more discussion would have appealed to me (if not to all). I was pleased to learn about Gorey's debt to Edward Ardizzione, if only because it reminded me who Edward Ardizzione is ... in my opinion, the high-water mark of Children's book illustration (I prefer gentle and illustrative to showy and garish) are his charming black-and-whites, as well as those of Pat Marriott (for Joan Aiken's novels), Pauline Baynes, Garth Williams, and Robin Jacques. (Maurice Sendak is a genius and in his own category!)

Several of the books illustrated were unknown to me, but looked like my kind of thing—so now I've also found a new source of reading material, as apparently the editor of Anchor Books and I have similar taste.

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). ( )