I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first encountered such a text so peculiar as this. Now, mind you, I am a curator of many special objects and always care to record date, time, and location when I procure an object so that I may validate its authenticity for future buyers. Unfortunately, however, at this moment it seems I have misplaced my records and so I must recall from memory the details of this artifact, I believe it is a coloring book, and how it has come to be within my possession. Before I begin, I must beg that you pardon me for such an unforgiveable act, but I am of the utmost certainty that you will agree that even the most renown and venerable curators, like myself, are prone to trivial oversights and lapses in memory…[1]
This coloring book appears to imitate the design of a standard paper-back novel, although it is slightly larger and measures 8.5 by 11 inches in width and height. It has a durable but flexible plastic front and back cover. The inner pages consist of firm construction-paper-like material with a smoother texture on which to draw. The book’s design allows an easy manipulation of the volume without fear of damage. While the material fabrication seems common, and I should know as I’ve come across many similar volumes authored by Jade Summer, the subject matter indicates an unconventional approach. Jade Summer’s book, titled “Edgar Allan Poe: The Adult Coloring Book,” contains four of Poe’s tales including “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Given the popularity of both Poe and coloring books, I found it rather curious that only a handful of them exist on the market. Ergo, with my interest piqued, I further investigated why this object appears so incongruously unique and mundane to other collectors, and to myself.
Once the book opens, we are presented with four of Poe’s tales. A title page introduces each story; contrast exists with a stark black background and white letters in a font that mimics scratches on wood. Following the title pages, Summer then recreates Poe’s narratives and includes five pictures, or line art drawings, that highlight the plot points in each of the tales. After the consumer colors in the line art tales, the same tales are duplicated to create a second set of line art images.
At this point in the description you may be wondering why the writer fashioned the coloring book’s design this way, and why having a duplicate set of line art images or a durable cover offers such a delightful feature. To the best of my knowledge I can inform you of the genesis and function of the coloring book. The idea of filling in line drawings originated in the early seventeenth-century with the publication of two map illustrations in Michael Drayton’s poem Poly-Olbion. This sparked the idea for artists to employ line drawings, or maps, as a medium for cultivating their skills; thus, the more copies of an image one had to map, the better training they would acquire. Aristocrats thought this ingenious and enhanced their artistic faculties through filling in outlined books with paint or ink. Due to volumes’ popularization in various social classes during the seventeenth-century, the revival of this artform has occurred in cyclical patterns; notably, their production has resurged with the [invention of the lithography in the nineteenth-century, https://time.com/4880819/coloring-books-history/] the introduction of wax crayons in the 1960s, and the current reception of picture books within children’s literature.
But I digress from the topic at hand, as this historical knowledge might seem irrelevant to you, or rather, it has relevancy, but I do not remember further details of this peculiar object. Therefore, I will leave it up to you, my readers, to determine the significance of this object. I hope that you will consider questions which I myself have been unable to answer due to the loss of my records.
Jade Summer’s coloring book, “Edgar Allan Poe,” part of a series of fantasy-based coloring books, uses visual interpretations such as line art to portray classic literary tales like Alice in Wonderland and The Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Buyers can access the books easily and purchase them for a relatively low price, approximately ten U.S. dollars, either online from her website or Amazon, or from large distributors such as Target and Walmart. The popularity of Summer’s coloring books suggests that consumers find amusement in this form of interpreting Poe, and many people treat them as legitimate novels given that some even leave book-reviews and others collect the entire series. Although, as stated on the front cover, the book markets itself as a coloring book for adults, Summer’s online website contends that it appeals to lovers, of all ages, of horror scenes and Gothic themes. The implied consumer includes people, child or adult, who enjoy Gothic themes and reproductions of Gothic literature. However, when advertising the book, it is assumed that buyers have read Poe’s tales and will recognize the key elements depicted within pictorial format. Also, since coloring books have predominantly been used by children, first for educational purposes and then for entertainment, Summer’s secondary title “The Adult Coloring Book” attempts to broaden her audience and argues that this book constitutes an authentic cultural adaptation of Poe.
The innate message marketed to its audience implies that everyone can be an artist. On the contrary, filling in already delineated spaces does not grant the status of artist. Thus, the function of the coloring book contains similarities to the function of some of Poe’s narratives: the coloring book borrows from the artistic ability of others just as Poe’s tales borrow from other writers’ narratives to entertain. Furthermore, because each tale limits itself to five pages, a coloring book adaptation requires that it sacrifices certain portions of Poe’s tales in order to emphasize critical plot points. For instance, in the final two line art images of “The Black Cat,” Summer depicts the husband swinging his axe at the brick wall in the basement, while his wife and cat stand alive behind him. The next image jumps to the wife, presumably dead, lying half in and half out of the brick wall with the cat looming over her body. For an object that markets itself to lovers of horror and the Gothic, the text censors the core themes of the Gothic such as gore, horror, and explicit murder. In Poe’s description of this scene, the narrator states “One day she accompanied me into the cellar of the old building…Uplifting an axe [I aimed a blow at the animal and it] was arrested by the hand of my wife… I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain” (603). However, in Summer’s rendering, we don’t know how the wife is killed, or that the husband buried his axe in her brain, or even that the husband abused the black cat. Instead of evoking disturbing elements of Poe’s tales, the wife may not even be dead because the depiction of her body/corpse appears so lifelike and whimsical. Therefore, as a result of the book’s construction, which limits itself to several sheets, those who have not read Poe may have immense difficulty in piecing together the original narrative. One could argue then that the coloring book, intrinsically, does not present an authentic adaptation of Poe as it loses key textual narration in pictorial translation from text to image. On the other hand, one could assert that like Poe himself, while we can question its authenticity, the book simply exists for entertainment purposes. Additionally, those who are purchasing the coloring book, and thereby participate in the American consumer culture, acquire the book with the knowledge that it exists as an adaptation of Poe’s original work and becomes susceptible to the author’s or manufacturer’s creative influence. Moreover, the book merely imitates Poe’s work, and in its reproduction of Poe, the coloring book further attempts to ingrain the fantastic and tormented words of Poe into our culture and society. If applying Poe’s words then to this object, society has “walled the monster up within the tomb” of the coloring book (606).[2]
[1] This introduction imitates the ambiguity of many of Poe’s texts as Poe often uses a frame narrative with a narrator who claims the truth of the tale may have been affected by disease, alcoholism, paranoia, sleeping, or dreamingge
[2] Poe’s text actually states “the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder… I had walled the monster up within the tomb!” (606) In its own way, the format of the coloring book has allowed society to transform the terrifying words of Poe and to alter them to create a new and fantastic collection of Poe’s works.