Thoughtful Alphabets: The Just Dessert & The Deadly Blotter by Edward Gorey
Hardcover format.
Astonishingly brief, captivating, decidedly engaging, for Goreyphiles: here. Its jolly, keen language meanders neatly. One ponders, quietly, rather strange tableaux. Uses verbs winsomely. Excited, you? Zowee!
What's this all about? In the mid–1990s Edward Gorey launched a numbered series of "Thoughtful Alphabets" featuring cryptic twenty-six-word stories wherein the first word begins with A, the last with Z. The first six Thoughtful Alphabets published (numbers 2, 3, 4, 10, 14, and 15) were hand-lettered posters with clip-art illustrations. Numbers XI and XVII, however, emerged as signed limited-edition books featuring—happily for us—Gorey's own drawings. First published by The Fantod Press but long out of print, these two gems are revived in Thoughtful Alphabets: The Just Dessert and The Deadly Blotter. In each, Gorey's inimitable drawings weave a tale of suspense and intrigue; the story proceeds as the alphabet progresses.
About the ARTIST
Edward St. John Gorey was a Harvard grad, a brilliant artist, a celebrated set and costume designer (his costumes for a Broadway production of Dracula earned him a Tony Award), a lover of animals (particularly cats) and the arts (he seldom missed a performance of the New York City Ballet), and an avid deltiologist—an obscure word so Gorey—like you might think he invented it himself (it means “a collector of postcards”). His humorously unsettling drawings of vaguely Victorian innocents often facing unfortunate ends became familiar to a wide audience after appearing in the opening credits of the PBS television series Mystery!