Gobolinks

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Thursday, June 18th, 2009

A Gobolink is like an inkblot, but it’s made for fun, not for psychological analysis! To make a gobolink, you drop a little ink on a sheet of white paper. Fold the paper in half and press down the ink on the two halves of the paper. Then you open the paper and you have a unified image. (You’ll have a mirror image on each side of the folded paper.)

You can see an old book of these images online at the Library of Congress. It’s called Gobolinks, or Shadow-Pictures for Young and Old, by Ruth McEnery Stuart and Albert Bigelow Paine. (New York: The Century Co., 1896). The authors wrote poems and limericks to go along with their gobolinks.

Here are a couple of my favorites from the book…

The Tail of Taddy PoleThere was a little polliwog
His name was Taddy Pole.
He lived within a little bog
Beside a crawfish hole.

And all the day did Taddy play,
Around a sunken log.
Until he lost his tail one day,
And then he was a frog.

*****

The Faithful Notes

An old guitar once broke its strings,
And all the musical notes took wings;
They hurried away to lands afar
But two of them stayed with the old guitar.

Enjoy!

Mama Lisa

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