The Peculiar Inkwell: Edward Gorey and Book Art

I wrote this as a grad school paper and made it into a little bound book illustrated by Edward Gorey, in the style of his little picture books.

The front cover of Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric LIfe and Mysterious Genious of Edward Gorey (2018) by Mark Dery.

I downloaded the Gorey font, based on Edward Gorey’s handwriting, which you can also download from here:

gorey ttf (the last surviving part of the dame hexpage)

Edward Gorey did not grow up in a manor house in Edwardian England. He was born in Chicago in 1925 and grew up there. His art background consisted largely of having a good teacher in elementary school and attending Saturday art classes as a high school kid (Ascending, p. 21). He never received any art degrees. He taught himself how to read at the age of three and a half, and between the ages of five and seven he read the Alice books and Dracula. His mother was employed as a government clerk, and his father was (like mine) a newspaper journalist (Ascending, p. 151).

After high school, Gorey spent one semester at the Art Institute of Chicago (Ascending, pp. 26–7), before he was drafted (it was World War II) and worked in Utah as a clerk for the army; the only thing he got out of his army experience was time…