Curious Correspondence with Edward Gorey

Edward Gorey's friends apparently called him "Ted". But, in our family, he was always "Mr. Gorey". My father chanced on his works during a business trip, back when they were small, slight booklets that seemed handmade. With them came an entire world, curious and enticing, fashioned out of the finest and most meticulous pen strokes. It was focused on luckless protagonists with preposterous names, languorous figures who proved surprisingly gritty. Their startling encounters and unforeseen fates soon established a hold on my preteen mind. Looking back, this is not surprising. I was a kid who worked in theatre, spending half of every day in a theatre school. Since the age of eleven, I had been portraying other children onstage. This surrounded me with ideas of glamour that, if not quite real, were certainly persuasive. Filled as it was with fantasy, costume and wit, Mr. Gorey's esoteric universe did not seem strange. All the more since my theatrical world was not the same one as the sunn ... Read full article.