Haunted Humpday at the Edward Gorey House!

The skeleton crew is joining Marfi at Marfi-topia for some spooky fun leading up to Halloween. Last week, while Burt and Ivy were rattling their chains and spooking the neighbors at home, His Madness and I spent an afternoon on Cape Cod with our son Andy and his wife Kristin.

We went for a walk along one of the many beaches and this one also had a long pier that stretched out through a huge salt marsh. It was low tide so we were able to catch the sightly creepy sight of hundreds of crabs crawling out of their muddy burrows to feed on plants and algae. It may be awhile before I order the seafood platter with crab legs.

 It was an unseasonably warm day but quite cloudy and a little rainy. All the more fitting for a visit to the home of a writer and illustrator best known for his humorous but "unsettling" books.

Our destination was the Edward Gorey House Museum, located on the Yarmouth Port Common. He was the creator of delightfully strange characters that inevitably fell victim to unfortunate events.

Many years ago, while working at the university library, HM recalled that he first came across Edward Gorey's book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies when it was being added to the children's library. 

It made such an impression on him that the drawing and text for the letter "N"  has been stuck in his mind ever since. Maybe it was due to the fact that he had to look up the meaning of ennui . . .

 . . . or that he just really relates to eccentrics!

Fans of the PBS series Mystery will recognize his illustrations from the animated opening credits. That was my first introduction to Edward Gorey's work and to be honest, for many years I had him mixed up with Maurice Sendak.  

Edward Gorey was born and raised in Chicago, after serving in the army during WWII, he attended Harvard and graduated in 1950. There's a wonderfully written biography of him here. Although he majored in French Literature, he'd always had a talent for drawing. After college he moved to New York to accept a position at Doubleday where he designed book covers and eventually became a well-known commercial illustrator. In 1953 the first of his own books was published. 

He went on to publish over one hundred books as well as keeping up a demanding career as an illustrator and printmaker. In 1979 he bought the cottage on Cape Cod with the proceeds from his production of Dracula. Originally done for a small theatre on Nantucket in the early seventies, it eventually found it's way to Broadway as Edward Gorey's Dracula where it opened in 1977.  It was quite a hit and ran for three years, winning Tony Awards for Best Revival and Best Costumes.

Speaking of costumes, just like his character above, Gorey was found of wearing fur coats, especially with Converse sneakers and often to the ballet. In all, he collected twenty-one of them before having a change of heart about wearing fur and locking then all away, sometime in the eighties.  

The kitchen of his home is decorated in typical Gorey style and with his own possessions. Who needs curtains when there's a giant bat to keep the sun out of your eyes? It's always fun to see a kitchen still intact in a house that's been turned into a museum. Usually, they have either been removed completely or turned into offices for the staff. 

Oh, no! There goes Una down the drain! 

Skull soup anyone? It's not just for breakfast anymore.

 The docent told us Edward Gorey was a huge ballet fan and had attended every performance of every production that George Balanchine choreographed for the New York City Ballet. Apparently, he designed a beach towel for one of their fund raisers, too.

In addition to his personal 25,000 volume library (which he left to San Diego State University, the docent said he had read them all, most of them twice!) he collected all sorts of things. The most notable ones on display were his jewelry, skeletons, rocks and toads.

A lot of them inhabit the window sills.

The lethal ones were clearly marked.

Edward Gorey died in 2000 at the age of seventy-five. He left his estate to a trust he established for the welfare of all living creatures, from the raccoons he allowed to live in his attic to bats and even invertebrates. Here is a great photo of him relaxing with three of his six kitties and a few thousand of his books. His home became a museum whose profits help benefit animal rights and literary causes.

If you ever find yourself wondering what to do on Cape Cod when it's raining or even when it's not, The Edward Gorey House is a fun and interesting place to visit.

Thanks for stopping by!