ENVELOPE ART.(Edward Gorey)

For years before his death, in April, 2000, Edward Gorey lived with a great deal of clutter, and as many as six cats, in a rambling house facing the village green in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts. That house has recently been opened as a museum, and the clutter has been replaced by cases displaying hand-colored artwork and personal effects: Gorey's first pair of baby shoes; an inkwell and a set of watercolors; some of the rings he wore, half a dozen at a time; and excerpts from journals he had kept since childhood.

Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, who was a close friend of Gorey's and an executor of his estate, worked at the house every weekend for more than a year, cataloguing its contents and reading through the journals. It was a treat, filled with insights and mysteries. Gorey was an obsessive man; some of the notebooks were just lists of movies he had seen, where ...