E Is for Edward: A Centennial Celebration of the Mischievous Mind of Edward Gorey

In this loving tribute, Hischak (Parts & Labor), director and curator of the Edward Gorey House, does not attempt a comprehensive catalog of the artist’s work. Hischak largely sidesteps Gorey’s career as a professional illustrator of other people’s books, a lucrative day job that allowed him the freedom to pursue his own strange obsessions. Instead, he presents Gorey as a “laudable model of how an artist maintains the equilibrium of creating highly successful commercial work while constantly producing unconventional works,” and features mainly the latter. These include masterpieces like The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet book in which 26 children die in increasingly terrible ways, which, though now a classic, was considered unmarketable and incomprehensible when it was first published in 1963. While also incorporating some straightforward biography—Gorey’s childhood was itinerant and somewhat troubled—this survey, playful to its core, does more showing than telling, excavating the artist beneath the commercial powerhouse with lovely reproductions of his early strange tales for children, pieces of personal ephemera like his collection of ticket stubs from the New York City Ballet (of which he was a devotee), and notes on his style of dress (“beatnik dandy,” a biographer once termed it). It’s an inventive and intimate retrospective of the most hallucinatory parts of a surreal body of work. (Sept.)