The Ghosts of My Friends
Red cloth 16mo with pictorial cover. Pictorial frontis and decorative title page; 48 leaves, blank except for lines designated for name and date. Very Good with mild general soil and age toning. The cult classic of cultish diversion, originally produced ca. 1907. Something like Spiritualism's answer to the autograph book, this album was designed to create a ghostly image from friends' signatures by folding the pages and creating a mirror image (perfect for when there's no time for an after-dinner séance).
While we often associate these kinds of images with psychological studies and Rorschach's Inkblot Test, that test wasn't published until 1921 (there may even be a copy of this book somewhere with Rorschach's signature in it, but it's not this one). This example comes from a private collection in Canada and has entries dated between 1912 and 1915. 48 leaves, blank except for lines designated for name and date. This copy was emphatically employed—there are extra signatures (and signature attempts) on the versos of many pages. Around 60 signatures (& ghosts!) in total, making this a particularly generous example.