“Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, / A vapor sometime like a bear or lion”,

says Shakespeare’s Mark Antony in a moment of lamentation. He is describing pareidolia: the tendency to hallucinate faces or patterns in meaningless shapes. This seemingly widespread ability has long been a wellspring for visual artists. The Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti went so far as to suggest that imitative art began when the ancients made minor changes to veined marble or knotted wood, bringing out a figure that was already partially present to their eyes. A parallel process underlies divinatory rituals: searching for images formed in tea leaves, spilt milk, or the distortions of a crystal ball. From the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, a microgenre of books appeared at the convergence of these two traditions. Marrying accidental artistry — the kind, for example, employed by Victor Hugo in his suggestive use of stains — to divinatory claims, inkblot books were part bestiary, part parlor-game séance, cataloging those creatures that seemed to crawl out of the inkwell with the slightest encouragement.