Kevin McDermott and Edward Gorey first met during an audition for one of Gorey’s so-called entertainments, a quirky staged production at New York University called “Tinned Lettuce.” It was 1985, and the date was Mr. McDermott’s 21st birthday.

“The first thing I remember is his laugh – a sort of guffaw,” said Mr. McDermott.

Over the next 15 years, he worked on four other Gorey productions and became a friend of the famously private author and illustrator. Mr. Mc-Dermott gained a rare glimpse into Gorey’s dark – yet humorous – world through visits to Elephant House beginning in 1991.

While Gorey once spent part of the year in New York, Elephant House in Yarmouthport, Mass., on Cape Cod, was his home. The nearly 200-year-old shingled and dormered gray heap was shaded by locust trees, and vines crept up the banisters of its front porch. Inside were Gorey’s collections.

Every weekend, Gorey visited antique stores and flea markets with his cousins, gathering objects that he organized into similar groups. Ordinary objects were aesthetically transformed by their abundance and repetition. Dozens of pewter salt-and-pepper shakers sat on a tray in front of a window. The “Ball Room” was filled with bowls of balls of various sizes and materials – wooden glass, stone. Gorey possessed things of great value and others worth nothing at all, but all were arranged into these careful little clusters. Even a relatively traditional collection and placement of it – paintings over the fireplace mantle – were crowded together salon-style.

“He set up these environments around his home and he created these relationships between objects that he collected throughout a lifetime,” Mr. McDermott said. “He liked finding objects that showed they had had a life, things that were worn, things that were in some state of decay. He loved finding objects,” he said. “I thought they said something about his wit and creativity that the world otherwise would never have witnessed because so few people actually got into the house,” he added.

In 2000, Mr. McDermott was living in his hometown of Cleveland, where he had run a gallery and was freelancing as a graphic designer and learning how to take photographs. That spring, he heard that Gorey had died at age 75 from the owner of Gotham Book Mart and a co-trustee of the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust, Andreas Brown. Mr. Brown called again a few days later and said that he was going to secure the property at the house in Yarmouthport.

The chance to travel back to the site sparked an idea in Mr. McDermott. Few people had ever seen Elephant House, and even fewer had been inside.

“I asked if I could go along and if I could photograph the house. And he sort of thought about it … so the two of us went up to Cape Cod,” he said. “He had a very unique place that said something about him, so I wanted to be surrounded by that one more time before it all disappeared. And I knew it would disappear, which is why I wanted to photograph it,” Mr. McDermott recalled.

Mr. Brown agreed, and Mr. McDermott shot a series of pictures that introduces outsiders to the intimate space Edward Gorey created for himself.

Until then Mr. McDermott’s professional life had been largely shaped by his friendship with Gorey. “So, every five years or so I would get the call or decide to put on another Gorey play. I thought the world was ready, again. But they were a lot of fun. The plays we did were a ‘hoot’ to quote Edward. They’re very funny, very different, very unique. We tried to create on stage Edward’s world. And we did that through the way we all moved – it was in this Goreyesque sort of way – the way we looked – we were sort of an odd looking group – and Edward did the sets, and it was this crosshatched world up there,” Mr. McDermott said. Over the five stage productions they did together, Mr. McDermott slowly took on the role of Edward the Author in the plays and musicals, and Gorey loved how he did it.

But on that cold and rainy April day at Elephant House, Mr. McDermott shaped our understanding and memory of that master of the macabre. While Mr. Brown surveyed the contents of the house, Mr. McDermott worked from room to room with his cameras, a Nikon 35 mm and a Contax 645 medium format. Mr. Mc-Dermott says he’s always wondered what Gorey would have thought about him taking those photographs.

“It’s the most loving invasion of privacy in the world, but I think he would be okay with what I’ve created,” he said. “I tried to do it in the most unobtrusive way and sort of the most reverential way because I respect Edward’s work and him so much. Someone described my photographs of the house as religious in some way and that may be a stretch.”

The crosshatched world of Gorey’s stories and their illustrations shares with the antique store a certain feeling, an essence. The man’s home and his art explain illuminate one another. And that’s why Mr. McDermott went there that day.

A year ago, the San Francisco publisher Pomegranate released “Elephant House or, the Home of Edward Gorey.” The book is organized by room – the Porch, the Entrance Room, the Living Room, the Kitchen, the Ball Room, etc. There are wide-angle, black-and-white photos of these, as well as lovely color close-ups of objects therein. Mr. McDermott introduces each section in a few paragraphs, and John Updike has written the preface. Interspersed throughout are excerpts from Gorey’s stories opposite drawings of Elephants that comprise a previously unpublished series.

These days Mr. McDermott lives in Chelsea and works at the Gotham Book Mart, helping to manage the Gorey archive – he also documented the bookstore’s recent move to 46th Street in much the same way as he did Elephant House. He keeps an office there and deals with requests for use of Gorey’s illustrations for things like books and reprints. He and the people at Gotham Book Mart are assembling another Amphigorey collection, called “Amphigorey Again,” which he says Harcourt has planned to publish.

Elephant House has been converted into a museum of Gorey memorabilia. The kooky stuffed animals and old-fashioned irons remain, but gone are the vines and the essence of the man himself.

Mr. McDermott is not currently working on anything for the stage, but “every now and then, someone will give me a call to do a play. But I’m not pursuing it at all and I’m not likely to pursue it. I was never very good at the business part of that thing.”

But if the option came along, he would do more Gorey: “I’d love to down the road. It’s so expensive to do it now and that’s sort of the problem, so if anyone wants to help with some cash, sure, I’d love to do it again … in London or maybe San Francisco or L.A.”