Edward Gorey Postcards

Edward Gorey loved postcards. He created postcards, collected postcards, and promoted the concept of postcards. I believe that his love of the format stems from the fact that a postcard is a stand alone, single image which tells a complete story in itself. While he often created and published postcards in themed sets, the images themselves did not have to relate to a story or to one another specifically.

Mr. Gorey created many sets of postcards, beginning with The Broken Spoke published in October, 1976 - see my postings from August 2009. Many of the subsequent postcard sets published by Mr. Gorey have already been discussed throughout this blog, but there are additional postcard images which were created outside of the "official" publication list.

Mr. Gorey often created advertising postcards for theatrical productions, book publications and art exhibitions. He also created a wonderful postcard for The Gotham Book Mart which looks like something of a puzzle when first encountered (see image to the right). Both sides of the card are printed with cats holding blank banners, each of which is meant to be written in by the sender.

In 1982, Mr. Gorey created twelve postcard images that were published by a Dutch firm and were reissued in 1998 by Artpost in New York (see all other images on this post). These 4.25" x 6" cards have fantastically detailed images which all poke fun at postcard writing itself. Each is captioned along the bottom with a rhyme relating to the mailing of the card. Because of the way these cards were published, this set is often not considered to be part of the official Gorey publishing/collecting canon, which is unfortunate.