Edward Gorey and His Githerments

He took all of his obsessions and made them into art

If anyone understood what a githerment was, it was Edward Gorey. The word sounds like something he’d make up, or a word he’d rescue from a forgotten English dialect (as I did)—and it just so happens that made-up or rescued-from-obscure-English-dialect-words are one of his githerments.

Edward Gorey, in other words, managed to cobble together an entire identity—and an astonishing art career—out of his minor obsessions, low-key interests, trivialities, running jokes, and areas of sub-expertise.

The fantastic biography Born to Be Posthumous digs deep into his influences and inspirations. It’s exactly the kind of biography I love: one that spends very little time on the mundane biographical detail that the author has discovered and feels obligated to write down, and instead dwells on the thing that makes their subject so interesting.

And in Edward Gorey’s case, it’s his githerments.

You probably first met Edward Gorey when you picked up The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which begins, brilliantly, with the line “A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs”…collected in his first anthology, Amphigorey. Or maybe you saw his animated opening for PBS’s Mystery…oh, what the hell, let’s all watch it now:

So here’s what I learned about Edward Gorey and his githerments. If you know and love his work like I do, see how many of these you recognize in his art:

• All things Edwardian, Victorian, and Jazz Age, of course. (a time period can be a githerment)

• The New York City Ballet in the era of George Balanchine

• The novels of Agatha Christie, which he loved so much that he once made a deck of cards called The Helpless Doorknob which he claimed could be reshuffled to create 2,432,902,069,736,640,000 plot combinations. (You can actually buy it new, but here’s a link to one of the original 500, signed and numbered, if you’d rather drool over that)

• An 11th-century novel called The Tale of Genji. He named his cats after characters in the novel.

• Anagrams and pseudonyms. He loved to write under names like Ogdred Weary.

• Hand lettering, which he was more or less forced to learn because he designed book covers for publishers and decided he’d rather draw the titles himself than bother learning the technical specs for typography.

• Antique engravings (obvious, but still)

• Weird old books (also obvious, but still)

• Silent movies

• Theater costumes and stage sets (which he went on to design for various productions)

• His own personal cast of obscure characters: E. F. Benson, Ronald Firbank, Louis Feuillade, François de La Rochefoucauld

• Pop culture: Golden Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Friday the 13th, Star Trek novelizations

• Antique stuff: Finials, cheese graters, doorknobs, old rusty machine parts, rocks, spheres of any kind

• Mail!

Which leads me to this: I was delighted to walk into a bookstore recently and pick up this odd and marvelous book, From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey.

For a year in 1974, Edward Gorey sent a letter almost every week to a new friend of his, Tom Fitzharris. Every envelope was meticulously decorated with Gorey’s fine, precise, and delightfully weird art. The lettering alone is a marvel. When I think of this brilliant and quite successful artist sitting down every week to create a fully executed work of art on the outside of an envelope—subject to the whims of postmark machines, mail carrier handling, and weather—I honestly can’t believe it.

And who else was he writing to? How many illustrated letters did Gorey send out in a typical year?

Can you imagine getting one of these in the mail?

I particularly love this one. The enclosed letter says that the bottles were inspired by an antique shop window full of them, and “the sun coming through them is not reproducible, at least by me” which is a great reminder that even famous and accomplished artists have their limits. He couldn’t render the light coming through the bottles using his style, his materials, his way of working. So he didn’t.

Once you know what he was into, you can see how much his art was really just a pastiche of all of his thoroughly-indulged interests. From the biography:

“I do have a strong sense of imitation. So I can afford to indulge this kind of exercise, filch blatantly from all over the place, because it will ultimately be mine.”

And later, “I kept thinking, how can I use that?”

He used it all.

In an interview with CBS, Gorey spoke of what he read and collected as bits and pieces sticking to his flypaper mind.

I’d like to have a flypaper mind, but I think I have more of a waxed paper mind. Which is exactly why I’ve started writing stuff like this down.

The thing about Edward Gorey is that he knew to gather his githerments. He collected stuff, he read stuff, he attended stuff. He was a fan, a season ticket holder, an audience member, a collector. He took it all in, and he figured out what he could make from it.

We all have stuff like this, which was the point of my original post. We might not think it’s as odd and interesting as Edward Gorey’s stuff, but when you start to pay attention to it, to write it down, to gather it up, it really does turn into something.

From The Unstrung Harp, Gorey’s long-suffering author preparing to convey his dissatisfaction to his publisher Scuffle and Dustcough

And he didn’t much bother trying to figure out how to make any of it commercially viable. His books were tiny and strange, and publishers gnerally couldn’t imagine what the market for them might be. (“I never changed publishers, they always changed me, as it were,” he once said of his publishing history.) For that reason, many of his books were published by his friends at Gotham Book Mart, a legendary New York bookstore that closed in 2007.

The fact that he operated for so long on the periphery of mainstream publishing, creating weird little books that sold in editions of five hundred or so, is remarkable considering how beloved he is today.

Oh, and speaking of githerments, and keeping track of them in some kind of notebook that can serve as a second brain, here’s where I kept my notes about Edward Gorey:

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Want to do this with me?

Supporters get a second email every week, on Monday, where we get into all things sketchbook in much more detail. Like this one, which you can click to preview:

Last week, we drew self-portraits as an Edward Gorey character. Why study how he drew people? Because, like many illustrators and cartoonists, he basically drew the same face over and over, and just changed the clothes and hairstyle. That’s a useful lesson for quick sketching! This, along with everything in our archive, is available for just a few bucks a month:

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Two New Events Just Added

You wrote the book, now book the talk: The amazing Jane Friedman , always a fantastic resource for reliable advice on writing and publishing, invited me to teach a workshop about how to develop talks about your book and have a speaking career. More coming soon about this, but for now: register for the class right here.

Appoint yourself artist-in-residence: The founder of the global Urban Sketchers movement, Gabi Campanario, asked me to teach a workshop at SketcherFest this summer about my self-appointed artist in residence idea. I’ll be teaching a workshop and also giving an artist talk on the idea. Workshops sell out quickly, so if you’re interested, go here to pre-register by March 14.

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