The icy tingle-touch of Edward Gorey’s influence is inescapable. This past Saturday marked the 100th anniversary of Gorey's birth, and the scope of his influence still continues to grow. Gorey’s work silences our thought tornadoes with the reassurance that ennui is inevitable, providing company for our misery, dressed in the endless texture of pretty and grimy broken lines. Edward Gorey's place is not as a cartoonists' cartoonist- his stories sneak too easily onto library and bookstore shelves, placing his work in that slim genre as work part of the mainstream without suffering from feeling watered-down. All week on TCJ we're celebrating the work of Edward Gorey with reviews, essays and articles from the archives, starting today with an account from contributor Cynthia Rose about his role as her childhood penpal, all dedicated to you, our own RDP.