Ink Flings
New York: Dodd, Mead and Company 1901. First Edition. 126, [1] pages. 8 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches. Oblong. Original red cloth with pasteon decoration and white embossed lettering. Minor wear, a few dings to the pages, overall a nice copy. INSCRIBED by Author Fagnani "If, on the fair, white page of Life, There falls a Blot, luck turns it into Fortune's Face Upon the Spot. Flora Carleton Fagnani" on the half title page. Very Good. Cloth. [23479]
On the surface this books describes what could be a fun party activity - fling ink upon the page, fold it over, and upon re-opening imagine the result and add a descriptive rhyme. The author provides many pages of fun examples, and the book was marketed in 1901 for a mere dollar in the holiday catalog. (Surprisingly scarce today with only 7 in OCLC/Worldcat as of 9/14).
On the more serious side, this activity has been around for many years even used in psychology today. Wikipedia notes that "Klecksography is the art of making images from inkblots. The work was pioneered by Justinus Kerner, who included klecksographs in his books of poetry. Since the 1890s, psychologists have used it as a tool for studying the subconscious, most famously Hermann Rorschach in his Rorschach inkblot test."
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