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The films of Tim Burton (“The Corpse Bride”), the one-panel comics of Gary Larson (“The Far Side”) or the Y.A. novels of Daniel Handler (“A Series of Unfortunate Events,” under the pen name of Lemony Snicket ) all bear his influence.
Source: Library of Congress
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Images: Courtesy
Cover Photo Caption: A limited edition of Edward Gorey’s “The Mourning Fan.” Book designer and binder, Patrice Miller. Photo: Shawn Miller. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.
Edward Gorey, that bearded patron saint of the sad and whimsical, the strange and witty, was born in 1925 Chicago, deep in the heart of the American continent.
But you’d swear, looking at his comic-but-disturbing illustrated books during the centennial celebrations this year, that the man was born into a dreary British family living in three-room flat in a shabby little village called Puddlington or something.
Happily, the instantly identifiable Gorey universe — built on “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” “The Unstrung Harp,” his Tony Award-winning costume design for “Dracula,” his animated intro for the long-running PBS show “Mystery!” — has become part of the nation’s background cultural fabric. The films of Tim Burton (“The Corpse Bride”), the one-panel comics of Gary Larson (“The Far Side”) or the Y.A. novels of Daniel Handler (“A Series of Unfortunate Events,” under the pen name of Lemony Snicket ) all bear his influence.
Gorey died of a heart attack 25 years ago at age 75, but his multiplatform work still seems omnipresent. Centennial Gorey commemorations range from a small display at the Library earlier this year to the publication of a lavish new compendium of his work, “E Is for Edward,” coming this fall, and dozens more events across the country.
“Enchanted at first sight,” writes Glen Emil, the collector who in 2015 donated more than 800 Gorey items to form the core of the Library’s holdings, describing his first reaction to seeing Gorey’s work.
For the unfamiliar, Gorey created a pen-and-ink, genteel, British-looking landscape in which bad things happened to small children, people had oddly shaped heads, nameless animals flapped about and a vague air of menace hung about the tea room. The sun rarely shone. He created the covers for hundreds of books, wrote and illustrated more than 100 of his own short works and illustrated posters and magazine articles by the score.
As his charitable trust puts it, his was a “vaguely Edwardian world of patriarchs in ankle-length overcoats, mustachioed men in padded dressing gowns, wantons with nodding plumes, uniformed housemaids, and children in sailor suits and pinafores.”
In almost all of Gorey’s illustrations, everything has just happened or is just about to. You have to fill in something to complete the action, plus add the emotion. The latter isn’t entirely clear because the scenario is kind of amusing and kind of disturbing at the same time. One’s mileage certainly varied, which was the intent.
Emil, who came across Gorey’s work at 18, built a website to showcase Gorey’s work in the early 1990s, when there weren’t even guidebooks for how to do that. He eventually donated the lion’s share of his collection because, after moving to D.C. and visiting the Library in “awe and amazement,” he was surprised the nation’s library lacked some of Gorey’s most charming work.
“I thought, ‘I could fix that!’” he wrote.
With the contribution of another 900 or so items in 2020 from another major Gorey collector, the late Edward Bradford, the Library’s collection grew to more than 1,700 items, many of them as delightfully eccentric as the man himself.
Here, in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, is “Elefantômas,” a limited edition of nine hand-pulled collagraphs. Gorey’s creature is a very slender man with an elephant head. Sort of. The book is wordless, save for the title.
Here is a limited edition of “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” that is … tiny. The smallest matchbook you’ve ever seen. It’s kept in a pouch wrapped in paper tucked inside a bespoke box.
“Gashlycrumb” is styled as a child’s alphabet book, but the cover illustration is a smiling, umbrella-holding skeleton, dressed in black with a flowing scarf, towering over blank-faced tots. Each letter of the alphabet is for a child who is about to die in a most unfortunate way: “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs.” Above this line we see little Amy, ghostly white with huge black eyes, hurtling face-first down a dark, wide set of stairs, arms outstretched.
The next page is “B is for Basil, assaulted by bears,” and there’s the hapless young Basil looking back over his shoulder as two huge bears, not in any particular hurry, walk toward him.
Gorey’s father was a journalist and his grandmother designed greeting cards (he later said she was the source of his artistic talent). The family was comfortable, as young Edward attended the private Francis W. Parker School in Chicago and was friends with Joan Mitchell, the future abstract painter. He took one semester of art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, served in World War II and got a degree in French Literature from Harvard, where he was roommates with the poet Frank O’Hara.
It was there that he found his signature look — long overcoats (in fur, for years), heavy jewelry, a magnificent beard and what were then called “tennis shoes.”
He worked in theater and was a huge fan of George Balanchine’s work at the New York City Ballet. He began illustrating books for Doubleday and eventually began to publish his own stuff, often working with the Gotham Book Mart in New York.
He never married, was outgoing, charming, and eventually bought an 18th-century sea captain’s house on Cape Cod, where he lived with several cats. He described his little books as “Victorian novels all scrunched up.”
Here’s another special edition of “The Curious Sofa,” with the cover made of plush red velvet, looking like it was snipped from an Edwardian sofa. The picture book is mildly sexually suggestive, concerning events at a weekend retreat of sorts, but there’s no one unclothed or even in a state of undress. It ends when “Sir Egbert” shuts the door to the room with the couch and “started up the machinery inside the sofa” with a lever.
The last page is almost blank, except for a small bunch of grapes that Alice, the main character, has dropped, with a tiny portion of the couch visible at the edge of the frame. The caption: “When Alice saw what was about to happen, she began to scream uncontrollably.”
We can only imagine what Gorey would have drawn for his own “Happy 100th Birthday!” card, but it would likely have involved something most regrettably unfortunate for birthday party guests.
