The craft of making art from inkblots is called klecksography (from
klecks, the German word for “stain” or “blotch”). The modern reader
might call to mind the Rorschach Test, but klecksography has a
much longer history.
The first person to publish a book using inkblots was Justinius
Kerner (1786-1862), a German poet and medical writer. Due to
failing eyesight, he would often accidentally drip ink onto his
paper. Rather than throw away the resulting inkblots, he decided to
keep them as artwork and wrote poems to accompany them. He
finished the book Klecksographien in 1857, but it wasn’t published
until 1890, twenty-eight years after his death.
In 1896, Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937) and Ruth McEnery
Stuart (1849-1917) published “Gobolinks,” (a play on the words
“goblin” and “ink”). Paine and Stuart envisioned Gobolinks as a
game, where the players have five minutes to create an inkblot and
then a poem to accompany it. Judges are chosen amongst the
group, and they choose the best submissions; players whose works
are chosen then become judges for the next round, and the
previous judges become players. After the proscribed number of
rounds, the final judging is conducted...
Blottentots, 3 January 2014 by David, paulelder.org
Pages 22 - 23 of “Blottentots” 1896 by Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937) and Ruth McEnery