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The word garret has appeared in 31 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Nov. 28 in the book review “A New Biography Takes On Edward Gorey, a Stubborn Enigma and Master of the Comic Macabre” by Jennifer Szalai:

Gorey, however, isn’t the easiest target for a biographer, as Dery himself admits. Part of this has to do with what seems to be the enormous gap — or the yawning crevasse, to put it in high-flown Goreyland terms — between art and artist. Even some of Gorey’s most ardent fans assumed he had to be British and long deceased. Such intricate, gothic scenes were supposed to unfurl from the pen of a wan, wraithlike neurasthenic holed up in a garret — not some towering Midwesterner partial to floor-length fur coats and busy days attending the New York City Ballet. There’s only so much biographical material Dery can wrest from the work.