GOREY, Edward "The Haunted Tea-Cosy" [Harcourt Brace & Co, 1997] Signed 1st Edition

GOREY, Edward. The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas.

New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997. First Edition, First Printing. 7.5" x 7.5", unpaginated. Original pictorial boards with matching dust jacket. Signed by Edward Gorey on a bookplate below the dedication. Like New, with the sole exception of “1998” neatly written in pen on the front free endpaper. Jacket unclipped and protected in a Mylar cover. A crisp, bright copy with no additional markings, wear, or defects observed.

The book is Gorey’s loose reworking of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, using the familiar framework of a Christmas visitation while abandoning any straightforward narrative or moral resolution. Figures that echo the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future appear, but in altered and deliberately ambiguous forms. Rather than offering redemption or sentiment, Gorey uses the structure of the carol as a foil for parody and quiet subversion, consistent with his long-standing interest in undermining conventional holiday themes.