Known for his instantly-recognizable line drawings of foreboding interiors, wan inhabitants, giant urns and peculiar creatures, Edward St. John Gorey wrote more than 100 picture books, illustrated hundreds more by other authors and won a Tony award for costuming the 1977 Broadway revival of Dracula — itself inspired by Mr. Gorey’s designs for a Nantucket production of the drama four years earlier.
Mr. Gorey also created posters for music and theatre events — and sometimes the events themselves — on Cape Cod, where he lived and worked year-round from 1986 until his death in 2000. His house in Yarmouth Port is now the Edward Gorey Museum, open seasonally from April to December.
The Sturgis Library in Barnstable, which also holds a number of Mr. Gorey’s works from his Cape years, has loaned more than a dozen to the Vineyard Haven Library for the next few weeks.
Displayed on the lower level during regular library hours, the Gorey exhibition includes playbills for theatre performances, posters for the annual Cape & Islands Chamber Music Festival (now the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival) and a signed print of his mock-naughty cover art for Alexander Theroux’s poetry collection The Lollipop Trollops.
Among other signed works in the show, there’s a print celebrating Yarmouth newspaper The Register’s 150th anniversary in 1986, with a family and their dog gazing raptly into the future from atop a bright red radish.
Fans will recognize some faces on the library wall. The poster for a 1981 Gorey exhibition in Barnstable, titled Work in Stoppage, features a pair of the imperturbably smiling cats made famous on the covers of his Amphigorey anthologies.
Another familiar Gorey figure is a black, beaked creature with human-like feet, elegantly three-fingered arms and no facial features, which adorns some of the most intriguing collectables in the Vineyard Haven show.
There are tickets and signed handbills advertising Mr. Gorey’s own, absurdist theatrical works, with subtitles like “An Entertainment devised by Edward Gorey.”
Combining puppets, music and literature, his “entertainments” ranged from the relatively straightforward dramatization of Helaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children (a video on the internet documents Mr. Gorey directing the puppet of Henry King, whose fatal vice was that he chewed on string) to the operatic Omlet, or Poopies Dallying/Rune lousse, rune de leglets, a double bill based on Hamlet and Madama Butterfly.
Another puppet musical, Lost Shoelaces, was produced at the Woods Hole Community Hall. There were also Chinese Gossip and Tragic Secrets, both in Bourne, and a 1998 stage production called Useful Urns, in Provincetown.
Mr. Gorey is often seen as a lone figure, but the ephemera displayed in Vineyard Haven gives a fuller sense of the artist as part of a larger creative community of actors, musicians and directors on Cape Cod.
The show arrived here through a connection forged at a recent off-Island gathering of library staffers, Vineyard Haven library director Amy Ryan told the Gazette.
“The Barnstable [Sturgis] library had these posters in their collection, and they got a grant from the Cape Cod Antiques Dealers Association to frame them so they could be exhibited and made available to other groups,” she said.
“We were all excited about it, because who doesn’t love Edward Gorey’s work?”
A member of the Library Friends booster group drove to Barnstable to pick up the posters, which are on display through the month of March and probably a bit longer, Ms. Ryan said.
“We’re trying to figure out how to drive them back,” she said.
The library’s Art in the Stacks program usually features work by Martha’s Vineyard artists, but Ms. Ryan said February and March are not popular months because there’s little likelihood of selling anything from a show this time of year.
“The timing was good,” Ms. Ryan said.
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