I don’t have it yet, but it shipped from the UK earlier today and I will have it in my clutches soon. What is it? Well, I saw this post on design*sponge and got a little giddy.

It’s a book from the early 1900s called The Ghosts of My Friends. The concept behind the book was to provide blank pages where one would have his/her friends pen their signature along the page lengthwise and fold it in half while the ink was wet, thus creating a somewhat smudged mirror image of the signature… sort of like the project I’m sure we all did in elementary school art class where you’d create some type of Rorschach-esque inkblot design.

Here’s a shot from the design*sponge post:

I found my copy through AbeBooks (my preferred source for used/antiquarian books) and a copy has shipped to me from the village of Leamington Spa in Warwickshire (near other charmingly named villages such as Bubbenhall, Cubbington, Leek Wootton, Haseley Knob, Long Itchington and -ahem- Middlemarch).

The bookseller’s description of the copy I ordered follows:

Author: Cecil Henland
Title: The Ghosts of my Friends
Bookseller Book No.: 31352
Book Description: Hardback Green cloth gilt with illustration on front cover and as frontispiece. Unusual autograph book in which wet in forms a ghostly /Skeletal appearance when friends sign their name and the page is folded in two. About half the pages have been filled in dating from 1907 onwards. Some of the results are remarkable. Signatures are of family and friends of the Tomlinson family one of who was Mayor of Grantham. VG condition.

I am enamored of the fact that the pages are about half-filled.
I am enamored of the fact that the signatures date from 1907.
I am enamored of the fact that the family was related to the mayor of Grantham.

Now I’m faced with a large dilemma and I probably won’t have a resolution until several weeks from now when the book actually arrives: do I whip out one of my fountain pens and have some of my friends and family sign their names so that my friends and family here, in 2008, not related to the mayor of Grantham, can have their signatures alongside those of people who were friends and family of the original owner in 1907?

Considering that this was the original and sole purpose of this book, would I be OK with the idea of writing in a 100-year-old book? With anything other book, I wouldn’t think of it - never ever. I don’t have a lot of old books, but the ones I do own have stories behind them and I like to preserve them in their original state (and show them off - I should do that here, sometime). Whether it’s fascinating marginalia (a copy of The Egoist by George Meredith), great illustrations (The Encyclopedia of Modern Sewing) or a terrific concept (Tales from Shakespeare - a sort of CliffsNotes from 1919 which contained prose summaries of all the Bard’s plays), there’s a reason for each one and I don’t mark them up in any way.

But I will definitely be photographing it when it arrives and posting some results here or to my public gallery on Picasa.