Fine Art Prints

One exciting and very complicated area for collecting the works of Edward Gorey is Fine Art Prints. This area is quite large and can be very confusing. Because the topic is so extensive, I will be discussing prints in several postings.

The question I am often asked is, "Is this a print by Edward Gorey?". Much of the confusion comes from eBay, where Gorey Posters and Edward Gorey, The New Poster Book (see my posting from October 21, 2009 for information on these books) are often cut up and individual pages are sold as "prints". These are pages cut from a book and are not Fine Art prints, even though some may look like prints because of their large format. The cut pages are highly decorative when framed, but have virtually no collectible value. Copies of the complete books have value, the cut up books do not.

The second most common printed Gorey image sold as a print is the John Locke Quote. A fantastic color image, the John Locke Quote was beautifully printed by Gotham Book Mart (from a piece of original artwork owned by Andreas Brown) as an oversized 8.75" x 7", blank greeting card printed on off-white paper, not card stock. The GBM information appears on the back of the card, but the folded flap is often cut off. This card appears so often as a Fine Art print that it gets confused easily, especially since Edward Gorey hand signed some of these cards.

Often, theatrical posters and broadsides produced for special events with images by Edward Gorey appear for sale listed as "prints". Once again, these are not fine art prints, even though many of them are signed and numbered. Here is yet another sub category of Gorey collecting!

Now that I have discussed which images are not actually Fine Art Prints (getting confused yet??), we can start to figure out which images are Fine Art Prints....in later postings!