Description

Spectral album amicorum of Yvonne Gallimard (née Redelsperger), wife of Gaston Gallimard, bearing her handwritten bookplate on the first white endpaper. Used between October 1908 and May 1910, it includes 36 ghostly signatures of playwrights, novelists, poets, journalists, painters, directors, composers and actors, including Edmond Rostand, Gaston Leroux, Sacha Guitry, Camille Saint-Saëns, Maurice Leblanc and Octave Mirbeau.... 10 pages were left blank.
Published by Don & Lester (London), the album offers signatories an amusing exercise: the name is signed vertically in ink on a sheet of glossy paper, which is then folded over: the signature, split and blurred in the manner of the blots on the Rorschach test, forms a drawing evoking the 'ghost' of the signatory.

The following signed the album: Georges Feydeau; Georges Berr; André Rivoire; Eugène Brieux; Maurice Hennequin; Maurice Donnay (who had to do it twice); Sacha Guitry; Henry Bernstein; Robert de Flers; Gaston Arman de Caillavet; Jean Richepin; Camille Saint-Saëns; M. de Tou Paul Milliet ; Pierre Wolff ; Paul Gavault ; Alfred Capus ; Romain Coolus ; Louis Ganderax ; Maurice Leblanc ; Miguel Zamacoïs ; Paul Hervieu ; Gaston Leroux : Fernand Vandérem ; Octave Mirbeau ; Eugène Fasquelle ; Henri Lavedan ; Émile Moreau ; Francis Chevassu ; Abel Tarride ; Marthe Brandès ; Abel Hermant ; Marthe Régnier ; Edmond Rostand ; ?? Menelli; Fernand Samuel; Henri Cain.

Responding at once to the fashion for autograph albums, to the craze for inkblots sparked by the experiments of the poet Justinus Kerner, and to a widespread fascination with esoteric games, the Ghosts of my Friends appeared for the first time in London in 1905, and were a great success in Great Britain and the United States: Mark Twain described in a letter to his daughter the ubiquity of these albums, which produced "something that looked like a skeleton" ["something that looked like a skeleton"].
This album belongs to a second generation of Ghosts of my Friends produced by Dow & Lester from 1908, bearing the name of Cecil Henland on the title: founder of the National Society of Day Nurseries, she is cited as the author of several albums of "Day Nurseries".parlor games".
(https://www.ghostsofmyfriends.com/)