Edward Gorey was a masterful storyteller and artist, and he was also a collector. Not of anything in particular that he could become an expert on, but everything. The extent of his collecting didn't become well known until after his death in 2000, when his possessions -artworks, books, personal items, and everything else, were sorted and catalogued for the museum that his home became.
When he wasn’t writing, drawing, illustrating, and designing—and even when he was—Edward Gorey was collecting. Over the course of his life, the artist gathered, and kept, everything from tarot cards to trilobites to particularly interesting cheese graters. “We ask the docents not to use the word ‘hoarder,’” says Hischak, grinning as he surveys the House’s newest exhibit, which focuses on Gorey’s pack rat tendencies. “But he really did hoard interesting things.”
And Gorey often made his collections into eccentric artworks. You can see some of them at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Atlas Obscura)