Customer Reviews

Elephant House: Or, the Home of Edward Gorey (Pomegranate Catalog)

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As I prepare to walk up to the porch of Edward Gorey's home in Kevin McDermott's book Elephant House: or, the Home of Edward Gorey, I am prepared to be surprised. Images flash through memory - bizarre inert characters from Embley and Yewbert to the flamboyant Figbash. I expect to be greeted by Doubtful Guest dolls lurking behind dank Victorian sofas and lots of black umbrellas. I hold my breath.

Instead, I find stones. Lots of them, clustered along the stairs to the left. A line-up of antique irons marches around the corner of the house. And books. Thousands of books are piled high among balusters and finials - architectural embellishments long separated from their structures gracefully and imposingly placed upon windowsills and cabinets. Clusters of nearly every imaginable sort of bits used in everyday life are tenderly collected and assembled. Groups of texture and form - standing wooden kitchen utensils and bocce balls mixed with perfectly rounded beach stones. Everything is older, well used and would have normally been discarded after a long and useful life. A huddled gathering of pewter salt and pepper shakers remain steadfast upon a tray.

As I gaze through the entrance room, through the living room and the kitchen, I find the author's black and white photographs eerie, haunting. Kevin McDermott's pages takes me from room to room, filling in the cluttered corners with anecdotes and reminisces of Gorey's life here, as one who knew him closely could only do. Not as a remote docent at the Van Gogh exhibit reciting textbook fare, but as a friend relating peculiarities about a companion.

The journey of Gorey's Elephant House is mostly black and white, with splashes of color photographs accenting the pages with surprising bursts of pigment. A cluster of bright blue glass bottles in a well lit window gives as much insight into Gorey's playful inventiveness as any four-page interview has attempted. I do find Figbash and the Doubtful Guest - they are not central but instead ancillary to a greater collection of flotsam and jetsam, worn stuffed animals and books, music and artwork, that filled Gorey's mind. Well, one theme appears central - books. The Elephant House was bloated with 25 thousand of them. I laughed out loud when I reached the library, as it looked to be only an extension to every other room. I have several friends whose homes are similarly endowed, so I understand its pleasure.

As far as the title goes - Elephant House - I happily find no token ceramic Asian elephant end tables, but rather an ancient commode with an abstract nod to a pachyderm. A chunk of driftwood in the kitchen is very elephant-like. Speculation falls on the aging scaly gray shingles on the house's exterior (Gorey could have easily called it the Frog House, however, for his love of frogs appears everywhere.) A sobering image of modern plastic pill bottles, artfully placed on a window sill, reminds me of Gorey's frailty in the later years and I am again saddened at our loss on that April day in 2000. This excellent book closes the tour with a haunting image that I could not part with for a good fifteen minutes. As John Updike notes in the forward, "Kevin McDermott's photographs bring us closer to Gorey than his art..." Closer indeed. Unforgettably closer.

Glen Emil,
www.Goreyography.com
1 September 2003

Kevin McDermott's Elephant House is an impressive new photography book. The photographs, taken only days after Edward Gorey's death, afford us an intimate portrait of the man as he lived. The book contains insightful photographs that capture the fine details of the way Edward lived and worked in his own space. Gorey clearly had a fascination with light and texture. He scattered a massive array of objects all about his home with a nearly curatorial eye. McDermott's well composed photos not only capture this aspect of Gorey but illustrate a common thread between these two artists: texture. One photograph depicts groups of small stones as they congregate idly on the rough wood of the porch. The cityscape of salt and pepper shakers and a plate of gourd-like, spherical shapes are beautiful studies in the texture and form of ordinary objects abstracted from their normal contexts, while many others are still lives made of the house's windows and the eclectically arranged objects in front of them. The blue bottles in a few images glow like stained glass as the washed-out light of a cloudy day streams in through them. What makes many of the color images so interesting is the spare, nearly monochromatic palette of colors in the rooms which are offset by only the blue luminosity of bottles or the green leaves of spring showing in the background. These are beautiful photographs independent of their connection to Edward Gorey, but serve also to enhance our understanding of him. The text is an entertaining and candid glimpse of Gorey as a friend knew him, and provides a nicely guided tour through each room. This book is handsomely crafted and thoughtfully designed, and I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in photography or Edward Gorey.

For Edward Gorey fans who think they know a lot about the world-famous author and artist, this remarkable new book of photographs and text about Gorey's residence on Cape Cod will come as a suprise. Photographer (and friend of Gorey) Kevin McDermott was granted permission to photograph the inside of the Gorey house which contained massive collections of art, books, rare objects and found treasures from flea markets,
antique shops and yard sales. (The hunt for most of these objects was a Gorey favorite pastime). The fascinating part of this photographic adventure is in seeing how Gorey carefully arranged objects among his 25,ooo books and thousands of musical recordings. This unique experience was lost forever when the contents of the house were were sorted and dispersed after the photographs were taken. So, here is your chance to visit Gorey's home as he personally arranged it. There is a fine forward by Pulitzer Prize writer John Updike who knew Gorey when they were both students at Harvard. McDermott's text is also filled with a generous number of his amusing and interesting anecdotes about Gorey, plus some choice ones gathered from friends and relatives. ELEPHANT HOUSE is a must for anyone who enjoys Gorey's unique work.

Edward Gorey was a mysterious personage. His works often leave one thinking "what next?". Elephant House by Kevin McDermott helps relieve much of this worry. Mr. McDermott has captured through his photographs and text what it was like to spend time with the elusive Mr. Gorey. This is a personal and moving tribute to a friend that never feels intrusive, but rather illuminates Mr. Gorey and the daily world he invented and inhabited. For those of us who have made Mr. Gorey a part of our own daily lives, Elephant House lets us spend some quality time with the man through his surroundings. A gem and a gift.

If you are an Ogdred Weary fan...this is a truly wonderful book. Photographs of the exterior (peeling paint and kind of saggy porch) and the interior rooms of the house on Cape Cod in Gorey lived and worked, along with his cats and figbashes, piles of thousands of books, assorted rocks and oddish things, and the expected miriad of curiosities. Alas, or delightfully...just the environment one would expect of the eccentric Edward. A cabinet of curiosities...a delight!

Author and photographer Kevin McDermott takes us on a remarkable ramble through the home of Edward Gorey, left undisturbed following his death. The wonderfully intuitive photographs give you the sense of seeing things not through the photographer's eyes, but as Gorey himself must have looked at them. The text is minimal, explaining some of the whims and passions that defined him and his extraordinary view of the world around him. By the end of this quiet stroll through the Elephant House, we have the uncanny sense of knowing Gorey in a deeper way through the environment he created for himself. It seems he still inhabits every room. A truly delightful visit.

This is a beautiful book of photographs and text that allows the reader an intriguing view of the home in which Edward Gorey lived and the collections of curious objects, books, and cats he filled it with.

The photographs are large and beautiful - haunting even - and there are lots of them. There is just the right amount of text to cast some light on the man behind the house and his elusive character - anecdotes about his life, his work, his friends and the things that inspired him.

If you are fan of Edward Gorey, or of eclectic interior decorating and design, and displaying collections of antiques, this book will be a treasure in your library.

This Fabulous book gives us a photographic incite into Edward Gorey, the man. It enlightens the reader with an increased knowledge of the sources of the characters and whimsy of the Groey books. The personal anecdotes of McDermott, made you wish you could have known the man in real life. Gorey would have been pleased with his friend's understanding of who he was. The photographers eye, saw the "art" of Gorey in his everyday surroundings. It was like walking in Gorey's shoes from room to room. A must have book for every Gorey fan.

Even dedicated fans of Edward Gorey will probably know very little about his personal life: he was an enigmatic recluse and few were permitted past his front door. Photographer Kevin McDermott's Elephant House will delight students of architecture and photography, providing rich duotone works of Gorey's intriguing home and its contents. A specialty item for the true Gorey collector, Elephant House is an impressive photographic showcase and a welcome addition to both architectural studies and photographic studies reference collections.

After wanting this book for along time and being a somewhat hard core Edward Gorey fan, I finally ordered and received this book. I sat with it and experienced an intimate glimpse into his private world and found myself feeling and learning so much about this man and our times. I seriously laughed and cried and everything in between by the time I finished my first page-though. The rich content of the images took me on a journey through his home and collections that touched many familiar and unfamiliar bases. I not only gained insight into the man, but into a window in time in the art and collecting world that was very familiar to me as a baby-boomer aged art/literature/theater type. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is the least bit interested in Edward Gorey and the late 20th century arts milieu. I was/am profoundly moved by this book and know that I will revisit it often.