Trivia / Edward Gorey

• Died During Production: The last compilation contains The Izzard Book (no relation), a collection of words beginning with Z. The pictures become rougher and sketchier until there's nothing but blank paper. The cataloguing of his effects after his death revealed numerous other projects left in various states of completion.
• He Also Did: It's amusing that Gorey, of all people, managed to win a Tony Award for costume design in the theatrical version of Dracula. (He really should have won for his stunning sets, but evidently politics dictated that someone else get the nod that year, and so the costume thing was a fall-back.) He didn't bother to attend the award ceremony, and gave away his trophy to a friend.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Gorey had also created two flipbooks (The Dancing Rock and The Floating Elephant). Unfortunately, only 100 copies for each of the flipbooks exist, and, due to the format, they cannot be replicated in the Amphigorey books. The same can be said for his unique pop-up book, The Dwindling Party. Though much easier to come across, this book also cannot be replicated in any of the Ampigorey books, and therefore can only be bought separately. Existing copies of the book also tend to be fairly expensive, costing between $60 to over $1000.
• Posthumous Credit: Some previously unpublished works from him have been published years after his death. It was even found that he may have actually finished another book, even before he started working on The Unstrung Harp, called The Angel, the Automobilist, and Eighteen Others.
• Unfinished Episode: Many, many examples. Gorey would often record potential ideas for new books in notebooks, with various working titles and potential illustrations for such works. The vast majority of them never made it passed the title alone. Some proposed titles include The Black Lobster, The Napkin Folders, The Haunted Blancmange and The Creaking Knot. Even when he's written a full story, there have been far more instances than not where he has never gotten around to illustrating them. The most notable example of this is The Yellow Thingummy, which was supposed to be another one of Gorey's alphabet books, where people named after letters of the alphabet discover a mysterious object and attempt to keep it for themselves, only to be passed onto someone else. This and many others were instead published in the newsletter N is for Newsletter in 1993.
  • The band The Tiger Lillies had also repurposed many of Gorey's unpublished works into songs for their album The Gorey End, with his permission. It certainly helped that Gorey happened to be a fan of this band as well.
• Word of God: Edward Gorey had once confirmed in a 1963 interview that his book The West Wing was meant to take place in, albeit a surreal version of, the afterlife. In his own words he said it was "Where you go after you're dead.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Gorey falls into this category, as he would often claim he had little to no idea "what he was doing."

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