In March 2022 a man named Tom Fitzharris brought three letters to the offices of The New York Review of Books. They were part of a cache of fifty that had been sent to him by the artist Edward Gorey in 1974 and 1975, all with illustrated envelopes. For almost fifty years, few people had seen the envelopes. Some examples were included in an exhibit at the Gorey House in Cape Cod and featured in a New Yorker article in 2002, but that was their last public appearance.
Fitzharris had been encouraged by a friend to turn the envelopes into a book, hence his visit to our offices. The three he showed us were jaw-dropping: Gorey’s signature lines (intricate and heavy black) with uncharacteristically large doses of color. We quickly agreed to work on the book with Fitzharris, and now New York Review Books will be publishing From Ted to Tom: The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey (Ted was Gorey’s nickname among friends) this month, to coincide with Gorey’s one hundredth birthday, on February 22.
It wasn’t just the envelopes that were remarkable. Almost every week while we worked on From Ted to Tom, Fitzharris brought a new batch of correspondence, and inside we found notecards with quotes from books Gorey was reading (beautifully hand-lettered by him, of course), tacky postcards, loose sketches, a church pew ticket, and typewritten letters. These suggested that Gorey was the same in his private writing as he was in his public-facing work: darkly funny, observant, morbid, curious, and sometimes gentle.
Tom Fitzharris
The envelope from the forty-sixth letter that Edward Gorey sent to Tom Fitzharris, depicting Fitzharris’s new apartment, June 1974
When Fitzharris agreed to include some excerpts from the letters in the book, I went through them more carefully. One of Gorey’s valedictions caught my eye:
More of this eventually. I have to draw a crocodile in the sewers of Constantinople.
There were no crocodiles to be found in any of the other letters Gorey sent to Tom. So where could this crocodile have been? It made me think of one of my first encounters with Gorey, in my middle school library: The Trolley to Yesterday, a young-adult novel by John Bellairs and illustrated by Gorey. The story follows Johnny Dixon, his friend Fergie, and a Professor Childermass as they time travel on a decrepit trolley to Constantinople in 1453, on the eve of the city’s fall to Mehmed II and his Ottoman forces. There are memorable scenes in the sewers of the former Byzantine capital, but the book was published in 1989, fourteen years after the letters were written. Plus, I couldn’t remember Johnny and Fergie encountering any crocodiles.
I turned to the brute force of Google: “Gorey Constantinople Sewer Crocodile.” A 2020 post on the Gorey Trust’s Facebook page revealed everything. The crocodile had appeared in “La Malle Saignante (The Bleeding Trunk),” the seventh episode of an ongoing, never fully completed project of Gorey’s called Les Mystères de Constantinople, which had been serialized in, of all places, The New York Review of Books. I asked our office manager, Diane, if I could visit the magazine’s archive in the basement.
Brittle and yellowed, several 1975 issues of The New York Review glared back at me: David Levine portraits of President Gerald Ford (Garry Wills: “Why Ford Wins”) and a fetal Adolf Hitler (Geoffrey Barraclough: “Farewell to Hitler”), the short-lived NYR Double-Crostics, ads for long-gone literary outfits like Quality Paperback Book Service, and covers sporting bold blocks of color and cover lines that, stacked atop one another, read like a prose poem:
Sick Japan
Noble Whales
Nihilist Women
Cavafy & Modigliani
Overrated: “NASHVILLE”
A quick flip to the table of contents of the issue I was looking for led me to a cartoon with a woman in a sewer escaping the jaws of, according to the caption, an alligator—not a crocodile. But see for yourself: reproduced below is the entire run of Les Mystères de Constantinople in the Review, serialized across eleven issues of the magazine in 1975. While both Alison Lurie and Review senior editor Eve Bowen have noted Gorey’s Mystères in our pages (as Lurie wrote of the serial back in 2000, the “heroine was thought by some to resemble one of the NYR’s editors”), this will be the first time it’s made an appearance in the magazine in fifty years. We’ve done our best with the scans, but admittedly the original printing was a little iffy. Enjoy! If you need me I’ll be in the basement, looking for more forgotten Review serials and fending off alligators…
The Mysteries of Constantinople Episode Seven:
The Bleeding Trunk
Image used with permission of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust
The title page for Gorey’s serial, from the Review’s February 20, 1975, issue. It reads: “Beginning in the next issue, episode seven: The Bleeding Trunk.”
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Image used with permission of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust
March 6, 1975
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March 20, 1975
Image used with permission of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust
April 3, 1975
Image used with permission of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust
April 17, 1975
Image used with permission of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust
May 1, 1975
Image used with permission of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust
May 15, 1975
Image used with permission of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust
May 29, 1975
Image used with permission of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust
June 12, 1975
Image used with permission of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust
July 17, 1975
Image used with permission of The Edward Gorey Charitable Trust
November 13, 1975
