A nice selection of Gorey drawings — on envelopes — from what will be a book, out in February, "From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey" (commission earned).
Have you ever drawn on envelopes? I have... enclosing fan letters when I was a teenager... long ago.
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21 comments:
Charming.
Be sweet cookie if Bob Dylan still had your fan mail envelopes.
Same--as a teenager.
Young Ann.
Last night's rats
Mature Ann forever young.
I have drawn on one large manilla envelope I was sending a friend, and on some regular-size mailings, (a half-dozen or fewer).
I can’t remember who I wrote fan letters to, but somehow the one person who stands out — and I know this seems crazy — is Peter Asher.
Gorey's stuff causes a lot of people to say "WTF"? These are the same people who often don't get my jokes.
Yah. However, speaking only for myself, I don't send out many letters and basically none of a personal nature. Except for a few bills like tax payments and such that require signature by hand, that practice petered out and then ended when we stopped sending out Christmas cards about 2000 A.D. or so. Except for cards announcing weddings, graduations, anniversaries, and such like are the only personalized mail i receive now. And that's only because the mavens of etiquette and Hallmark™ keeps that practice going. For now. Doodling on envelopes is like sealing letters with wax. These elegant practices from different time are today quentisential SWPL effluvia.
I used to take large photos out of magazines and fold them into envelopes. You have to arrange an uncluttered spot for the address.
I got illustrated envelopes and letters from my friend Bobby in the summer of '69, when I was stuck in Alexandria VA. I looked for them after he died in 2013, so his wives and daughter could see how funny and talented he was, but didn't find them among my oldest papers.
Are you persnickety wordsmiths okay with calling them illustrations instead of doodles?
I haven't opened my Amphigorey books in decades, but I may be compelled to buy this one. Strangely, Amazon didn't try to sell me those compilations.
Something tells me there was more than friendship involved--and a big age difference.
That's neat.
"Cryptic Smear" would be a good name for a band.
It was the bangs. Made her go to pieces.
It's quite possible that Mike Myers took his Austin Powers look from Asher.
And it's true!
I congratulate myself.
Sure, if you can explain to me what the drawings are illustrating. That's like calling Jackson Pollock's paintings "illustrations" of the neurons storming in his brain.
Sorry, I felt called to answer even as I always gag on "wordsmith," a word that generally has many better replacements, in this case maybe "amateur lexicologists."
Yeah, baby.
Sorry. I thought ‘junior suzie dents’ was too obscure for a mostly american audience…
I accidentally killed Ayn Rand by writing her a three-page fan letter with a bunch of teenaged questions about her book, Objectivist Epistemology. Three days later, she was dead, likely from sheer frustration. The day I discovered V. S. Pritchett and sat up all night reading him, he died. He was almost 100. The same thing happened with V. S. Naipaul. I picked up a copy of Among the Believers, never having read him before, and literally heard of his death driving home from the bookstore. Richard Hugo died as I was reading the first book of poems I found by him, What Thou Lovest Well Remains American.
Three of these are very worth enjoying. Ayn Rand, well, she was a very under-appreciated literary critic, and The New Left is a great read.
With this superpower, I should probably read more people I hate.
The Gorey tale is very touching. Wasn’t typing on stationary great? I feel comfortable saying this as he has already gone to wherever he was heading. He was always half-way there. Ink pens do leak.
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