Would Edward Gorey even be able to find someone in the US willing to publish his work if he were working today? I grew up with Gorey’s books and loved the humor, his fantastic drawings and his weird characters… but somehow suspect that humorous references to pedophilia (like in the below limerick poem) or alphabet books about children getting killed in various tragicomic ways (The Gashlycrumb Tinies) just wouldn’t fly in 2015… but the actual children’s books I was given as a very young child were probably pretty sick by today’s standards*, so what the hell do I know?
*I grew up with books like Hoffmann’s Der Struwwelpeter or Busch’s Max und Moritz that claimed the high road by insisting that they portayed children being burned, maimed, attacked by animals, etc., in order to scare the little fuckers out of misbehaving. I don’t believe that they actually worked that way — looking at the picture of the kid who got his thumbs cut off or seeing Max & Moritz ground up in a mill probably got me MORE interested in what was dark and twisted rather than less.