A Book of Spectres

London: Dow & Lester. n.d. [1909].

How to see a ghost

184x117mm. pp. [2], 23. 25 colour plates. Original blue-grey cloth lettered in black and illustrated with a silhouette of a skeleton (one of the images from the book). Some soiling to the boards and slight rubbing to the corners and head and foot of spine. Internally very good but with some offsetting from the images. 
Rare, only one copy (Ricky Jay's) appearing in the auction records. It seems to have been first published in New York in 1908 with a London edition issued in 1909 and then again 1915. Worldcat records eleven copies of all three editions (six of the 1909, one of the 1908 and four of the 1915).
The purpose of this strange little book is to demonstrate "how easy it is for anyone to see a spectre", Roger's argument being that "many so called ghosts have originated as complementary color images". This is the familiar optical illusion created by looking intensely at an image for about a minute and then averting ones eyes to a blank white space such as a wall. The colours from the image then appear in their complementary form - red to green, blue to orange etc and vice versa. It is true that images so produced do have a spectral quality but what lends Rogers's book its particularly weird flavour is his choice of pictures to demonstrate the theory. Here be skeletons, witches, ghosts, devils, genies and owls. Bizarrely entertaining.

Ref. 5321