Church Monsters!

Gargoyles and I go way back. On a trip to The Cloisters, when I lived in Manhattan in the 1980s, I met and befriended Mr and Mrs Lester Burbank Bridaham. With a Master’s from MIT in Chemical Engineering, he became an artist, writer, scholar, museum director and one of the world’s leading Medievalists, the very embodiment of a Renaissance Man. I later visited the Bridahams at their Denver home to pitch a book idea - a colourful, mass-market paperback on Gargoyles. The house, filled with extravagant works of art, was itself a kind of mini-museum. It never took off, however, because he objected to my breezy, non-academic descriptions of Gargoyles, Grotesques and Chimères. I still have his prototype of the volume, with pictures he took all over Europe. I remember him with fondness and regard. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version on Gargoyles.