Admire the absurd and the strange with the Edward Gorey House's Moveable Books exhibition

Take a peek through the “Tunnel of Calamity,” a peep show book full of Victorian-age characters hiding behind every fold. From one angle, the viewer sees a woman wearing a bonnet and a red arm muff surrounded on each side by children dressed in white dresses and black suits.

A quick turn of the head and three men wearing fur-lined coats and top hats appear in the viewfinder. Each a character of seemingly no real purpose, yet all suspicious. In true Edward Gorey fashion, their purpose of existence has no true meaning yet the viewer is left wondering about them.

The “Tunnel of Calamity” is one of the several works featured in the Edward Gorey House’s new exhibition “Exquisite Corpse,” a display of Gorey’s Moveable Books. The Edward Gorey House is in Yarmouth Port.

Gorey, who officially made the Cape his home in 1983, created his collection of Moveable Books — a book “expressing its story in a physically interactive and unconventional way,” according to a press release for the exhibition — both commercially and independently. The books, according to Edward Gorey House Director and Curator Gregory Hischak, serve no real purpose beyond fulfilling Gorey’s artistic fixation at the time.

“He got a book and really messed with it on every level,” Hischak said about all of Gorey’s creations. “The content of it was really messed up or obscure. It's absurd, not self-explanatory.”

The exhibition, which is on display through Dec. 29, features almost all of Gorey’s Moveable Books — save "The Curse of the Heavy Reader," a sales piece Gorey made in 1967 that he sent to advertisers at Esquire Magazine that Hischak just couldn’t get his hands on — and some of the moveable and miniature books Gorey had collected, loaned to the exhibition from San Diego State University Library and the Edward Gorey House Trust.

“With the moveable books, the stories were weird,” Hischak said. “He's also playing with you physically … I think he really liked playing with how people went through the book (because) people wouldn't go through it the same way.”

In “Exquisite Corpse,” Gorey makes his own version of a game popular with surrealist artists where a number of different artists — typically three, according to Hischak — would each draw a different part of a figure and create mismatched bodies from their creations.

“Each of these figures gets divided up into a head, a torso and legs,” Hischak said. “... What's cool is you would think that at some point, there's going to be a complete bird or complete bug and there isn't.”

No two books are quite the same

Each book presents the reader with a new sort of game as no two are quite the same. In one book, titled “Raging Tide,” the reader is led on a choose-your-own-adventure style of hunt as they flip each page to find directions from Gorey on how to proceed, each choice bringing the reader to a different ending.

“He gives you these instructions for going through it … and it’s totally pointless text like ‘Figbash and Naeelah assaulted Hooglyboo with cookie cutters,” Hischak said, reading from the pages on display. “Below the instructions are ‘if you are not repelled by this turn to page 20. If you are turned to page 16.’”

In another, “Leaves of a Mislaid Album,” the traditional book is scrapped and instead the reader is greeted with a folder full of random drawings, almost like an artist’s album that has “been disassembled and scattered across the world,” according to Hischak.

“You don't have any story or context for any of these people but like all of Edwards's work, you get the impression that it comes from a bigger work,” he said. “You're aware of the fact that he's left stuff out.”

Of them all, arguably the most absurd is Gorey’s “QRV,” a miniature book so small readers can barely get it open to see the pictures, which Gorey drew to scale like all of his other works, inside.

'Totally pointless'

“We consider them moveable books because they're totally pointless,” Hischak said. “You can't open them, hardly at all. You can do it a few times but I guess how many times (do) you actually read a book anyway?”

To see the full exhibition of Gorey’s Moveable Books, “Exquisite Corpse” and the other works are on display through Dec. 29. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for students, teachers and seniors (65+), $4 for children 5 to 12 and free for children under 5. Hours for the Gorey House are as followed:

Spring Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday from April 4 to June 30.

Summer Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday from July 3 to Oct. 13.

Fall/Winter Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday and Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday from Oct. 18 to Dec. 29.

Due to capacity restrictions at the Gorey House, reservations are recommended but not required. To make a reservation or for more information, visit www.edwardgoreyhouse.org/ or call 508-362-3909.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Edward Gorey's Moveable Books play with reader's imagination