Here's to good... Gorey

I ran across this photo of Edward Gorey napping with his many cats in what I assume is his library (though my whole houseboat is bookified and catified so no assumptions here). What a lovely photo found here! I especially like the section title of the newspaper the forefront cat is sacked out on - At Home. Great title for this photo, actually. If you don't know Gorey, you probably do and don't realize it. He scurried into my consciousness via a poster of his illustrated alphabet, the Gashlycrumb Tinies. It hung in a classroom at the Baylor journalism dept., and distracted me to no end for its sheer, well, Goreyness. Working after hours in that same classroom writing articles, as well as teaching years later as a graduate lecturer (the poster hung in the exact same place and probably still does), I wanted terribly to give into constant thieving impulses. I easily rationalized plucking the tacks from the wall, rolling the poster into a cylinder and securing it with a rubber-band snap for the walk home since it was unlikely too many others enjoyed those creepy, malevolent, alphabetic children and their freakish demises more than myself. If it hadn't been Dr. Sara Stone's poster, I wouldn't have hesitated. But it was, and I did. Even now there's probably an odd cast in my eyes as I write this and know that my desire to liberate the illustrations from their unflattering push-pin servitude as ornamentation to florescently lighted acadamia would not have been an altogether immoral action. Check out his museum.