In 1972, John discovered “Amphigorey” by Edward Gorey. The book was a collection of Gorey’s first 15 stories. This student read it and reread it for four years. His collection began in college. Due to the humid weather in Hawai’i, Carollo worried that his collection might be damaged and wanted to protect it. Carollo also couldn’t bear the thought of ever selling any of the artwork he has collected over the years. “I have never sold anything,” he says, “Never made a profit off of (my) Gorey art.” There’s just something about selling a piece of art that feels wrong to Carollo. However, this posed a problem. The solution: Carollo began speaking to an attorney about setting up a trust. Part of that trust included donating pieces every year to the University of Hawai’i. He was impressed with the work of the preservation department at UH, and every year for the past six years, Carollo donated pieces from his Gorey collection to UH. He will continue to do so. Already, the collection at UH has over 1,000 pieces including one original Gorey illustration which Carollo calls “small masterpieces.” Carollo believes this collection should be shared and wants to get people interested. He wants art students to be “inspired to create great art.” Carollo calls Gorey’s work funny: “He takes the human condition, which, when you look at it, is bleak, and he helps us get through it.” It has an “existential spin” to it, according to Carollo. Gorey’s work even helped Carollo to write a piece entitled, Themes from Edward Gorey, influenced by Gorey’s whole repertoire of work. “Gorey loved the English language,” Carollo enthusiastically explains. The titleAmphigorey is actually a play on words. The word ‘amphigory’ means ‘verse in nonsense,’ but Gorey spelled it with the extra ‘e’ to reflect his own name. Gorey wrote over one hundred books, which he also illustrated, even though it’s his illustrations that are more recognizable. “Every work is so wonderful it can’t be repeated, you can’t replace it” Carollo shares. Like Carollo himself, Gorey was a recluse, and he felt that “human conversation, by and large, (was) a waste of time.” But, Gorey could “create fantastical creatures out of nothing, even if he couldn’t draw a still life. He always started with a storyline and had no idea what the illustrations would be like until he began to draw them one at a time.”

An exhibition of the works were shown as Detailing Gorey: Themes from the Work of Edward Gorey (An exhibit of the Edward Gorey Collection of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa Library).