Presenting Dwindling Figbash

madolan — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:19:15 GMT

Like many of you, I'm an Edward Gorey fan.

The spindly fellow having a go at the woolly one with an antimacassar is Figbash. Figbash appeared by name in The Raging Tide: or, The Black Doll's Imbroglio, a grim (or maybe effervescent) illustrated book in the choose-your-own-adventure mold. A Figbash stuffed doll exists, as do an illustrated alphabet and various rubber stamp designs. Figbash is significant because beyond the famous illustrations for Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats few Gorey characters had names, and fewer of those appeared in subsequent works. Figbash therefore became a touchstone and keyword for Gorey collectors and appreciators.

The Raging Tide's 1987 publication date is generally accepted as Figbash's year of birth. I disagree. When I first saw The Raging Tide I felt certain that I already knew Figbash intimately.

In 1982 my parents bought me a pop-up book. The Dwindling Party was my first introduction to Edward Gorey and remains my Platonic ideal of pop-up book, Gorey piece, and how to parent a young child. (In first grade I would do a "dramatic interpretation" of the book for the William Yates Elementary School talent show, which consisted of me reciting while kind of pantomiming the story. I still have it memorized.) It's an unnerving book full of monsters, and particularly creepy to me was a thin black haunt that went floating through the graveyard while a skeleton absconded with the little MacFizzet girl.

Looks like a Figbash prototype to me, published five years prior to his accepted first appearance. Care for a closeup of all the relentlessly cheerful death? Click here.

The creature is important to me because in my early teens I had so strong a nightmare about him that I avoided Edward Gorey's work for years. Years. (My dreams tend to be full-body experiences.) I eventually got over it and came back to loving Gorey even more than before the nightmare. The little ink sketch now taped to the candlestick signifies past tattoo tryouts. That's how much he came to matter to me.

From the blank guts of the book that my parents gave me as a child, torn and broken-spined now (not the near-mint version pictured above), I gently extracted my fearsome proto-monster. Here he is in a grand closeup (somehow more and less out of context, the poor dear, and subject to my inferior scanner):

Google searches didn't bring up my theory, though I assume I'm far from the first to speculate on this. I hereby name him "Dwindling Figbash" and proclaim this the Dwindling Figbash theory.

I love him dearly.

Apocalipstick

Presenting Dwindling Figbash