Ben Schott shares the strange worlds created by Edward Gorey

Among the many joys of lockdown was finding how much we can tell – or should that be how much we think we can tell – about people from the contents of their bookshelves as seen in the background on Zoom calls. Remember Michael Gove’s bookcase, which notoriously featured a book by Holocaust denier David Irving and a copy of The Bell Curve, a controversial treatise which discusses purported connections between race and intelligence?

Writer and designer Ben Schott definitely believes that bookcases offer a window on the soul or at least a window on their owner’s sense of humour. “There are certain writers, when you see them on a bookshelf, you know their owner will be a good egg,” he says. Two of those writers are PG Wodehouse and Edward Gorey.

Schott himself is best known for his multi-million-selling Miscellanies, the books found in everyone’s Christmas stocking in the early noughties. These days he writes for Bloomberg Opinion and has recently published a second novel, Jeeves And The Leap Of Faith, a homage to PG Wodehouse with the blessing of the late writer’s estate. So it goes without saying that Schott much admires PG Wodehouse, but when it comes to indicating that a reader is truly “simpatico”, as Schott puts it, it’s perhaps Gorey that has the edge.

You know an Edward Gorey book if you see one. The author’s delicate line drawings of brooding gothic houses and the curious creatures that inhabit them are unmistakable. But between the covers of the enchanting tiny hardback books that at first glance might look like the perfect gift for your godchild, is a world more darkly funny than anything Dahl dared imagine.

“His books are haunting, absurd and glorious,” Schott says. “I adore writers who create and capture their own world. Graham Greene had Greeneland. Wodehouse had Woostershire. Gorey had Goreyana, littered with dark and foreboding English mansions and haunted by men in astrakhan coats and Converse All-Stars, which was what Gorey himself liked to wear.”

Though the sensibility of his work seems thoroughly English, Edward Gorey was born in Chicago in the 1920s. While he is now widely known as an illustrator, Gorey spent just one semester at the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 1943 but by the 1950s, he was working in the art department of Doubleday Anchor, creating covers and interior illustrations for both adult and children’s books.

Gorey’s own first book was The Unstrung Harp: Or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel, published in 1953. Gorey’s hero, Mr Earbrass, esteemed author of A Moral Dustbin, begins a new novel on 18 November every year (the original NaNoWriMo, perhaps), having chosen a title from the list he keeps in a small green book. As Gorey’s debut approaches its seventieth birthday, any modern author will still recognise his description of a literary dinner with its talk of “disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, works than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews… and the unspeakable horror of the literary life.”

Gorey wrote more than fifty books in all, some of which were entirely without words. They were generally classified as humour and Gorey viewed himself as an author in the same genre as Lear and Lewis Carroll – literary nonsense. However his illustrations were taken very seriously indeed by the art world, who viewed him as a surrealist.

The Doubtful Guest is a classic of the Gorey canon. A creature that seems to be a cross between a crow and a penguin, in a striped scarf and hi-tops, makes himself comfortable in a grand Edwardian home to the consternation of the residents. Schott also highly rates The Curious Sofa, which he describes as “a porno horror book with no sex and no violence. Gorey describes an object by its contours. He doesn’t just dive in. He comes at it through angles. What you leave out is important. It gives the reader the space to feel.” The last illustration in particular is incredibly disturbing given it’s just a drawing of two legs of a chaise and a bunch of grapes. But Schott’s Gorey favourite is perhaps The Gashlycrumb Tinies.

The Gashlycrumb Tinies forms part of a group of books Gorey named The Vinegar Works: Three Volumes of Moral Instruction. It’s an alphabet of infant deaths from “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs” to “Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin” via the charming “Neville who died of ennui” and poor Xerxes, eaten by mice. Death grins out from the frontispiece as he holds an umbrella over the 26 unfortunate tots as they await their horrendously humorous fates.

The Gashlycrumb Tinies is perhaps not for the sensitive under-10s in your life but as Gorey himself said: “If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there's sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children – oh, how boring, boring, boring.”  

“Could you publish The Gashlycrumb Tinies today?” Schott asks. “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s time for a gothic revival.”

Schott was introduced to Gorey’s work by a friend –  “There was a sliver of goth in her” – and he believes you have to quite literally hand Gorey’s books to people in order to have them appreciate the writer’s world. “It’s difficult to describe. You have to hold one of the books and open it anywhere.” The reaction people have to the page their eyes first fall upon is, Schott says, a “litmus test”.

“What I most appreciate about Gorey is the application of talent to whimsy. We’ve lost that in the modern world. Gorey embodies effortless effort and casual seriousness. Frolic with intent. What I’ve learned from him is that frivolity isn’t unserious and you need to take frivolity seriously.”

Schott concludes, “Times like this, when people say ‘this is no time to be frivolous ‘ are exactly the time when frivolity is most important.”