Biscuity

At the British Museum in the spring of this year.

A visit to see a local producution of The Addams Family sent me to my books about Edward Gorey. Humming the tune [Death is] “Just Around the Corner,” I dipped into Alexander Theroux’s The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (Fantagraphics Books, 2002), in which tonight’s word appears. 

With their hand-lettering, queer layouts, their framed and ornate borders, the small books seem frightfully old-fashioned and biscuity, as if they had been secretly pressed out and printed in suspiciously limited editions in the cellar of some creepy railway warehouse in nineteenth-century England by some old pinch-fisted joy-killer in a black clawhammer coat with red-hot eyes, a black scowl, and a grudge against the world — and then managing to survive the must of long years by their sheer grostesquerie and horror. 

Biscuity: Like a wormhole to somewhere serene and delightful — a window chair on an autumn afternoon etc. etc. 

I just love it. It’s elegant to take in at the eye and it also feels wonderful in the mouth. 

And, happily, this instance of biscuity has been homed in a distinctive paragraph. 

A signed first edition on sale at
Between the Covers Rare Books, in Gloucester City, New Jersey.
One of the shop’s owners, a past president of both
the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA)
and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB),

lectured at the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar when it ran at Colorado College.

Gorey illustrated The Shrinking of Treehorn, my favorite book when I was six years old. 

How the late artist would react to the quote unquote reimaginings of his illustrations in the Netflix movie to be released this Friday (the 10th), I shudder to think. Hurling* (or, as my late mother would have put it, womiting)? 

I have somewhat liked at least one Ron Howard film in the past, but the description of this project brings to mind the “If They Had Had Prozac in the Nineteenth Century” cartoon so many people put on their fridge as soon as it was published in the New Yorker in November of 1993 (hey—30 years ago!). Do you know it? It features a transformed Marx, Nietzche, and Poe. Poe is particularly funny greeting a raven in the foreground with “Hello, birdie!” The artist is Huguette Martel. 

Does Ron Howard do justice to Treehorn? Somebody will find out. Likely not I.

* According to Theroux, a word Gorey used.