In 1968, the same year as Gorella produced the Sade portfolio for Merlin, the major German publishing company Bertelsmann commissioned a series of illustrations for a new edition of the classic collection of Indian, Persian and Egyptian tales The Thousand and One Nights. His detailed and delicate line drawings bring life and character to the thirty-two selected tales, in the best-known German translation by the oriental and Arabic classicist Gustav Weil (1808–89), who studied the original sources for the stories.

Of the more than sixty illustrations created by Gorella, we have just included those he created to go with the more erotic of the stories. He clearly read the texts carefully, and researched sources of period and regional art, as these illustrations have an authenticity about them which is rare in many European and American interpretations of Arabian Nights.