ML - CONFESSION ALBUM

WHAT IS A CONFESSION ALBUM?

A confession book, or confession album, was a kind of autograph book popular in late-nineteenth-century Britain. The genre died out towards the end of the century, with occasional brief revivals in the twentieth century. The same kind of form is now found in the Dutch vriendenboek ("friends book") and German Freundschaftsbuch ("friendship book"), used by small children; and the questions that the confession album contained live on in the Proust Questionnaire. 

The origins of the confession album are unclear and the questions posed in it varied from volume to volume. Whatever their origins, confession albums were an established form by the 1860s: Henry d'Ideville records using an album in 1861; Karl Marx filled out answers to one in the spring of 1865; and Friedrich Engels answered another in 1868. Other historical figures who have answered confession albums are Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Cézanne, Martin Boucher and Enzo Kehl.

Early albums often had blank pages into which owners would paste the questionnaires; the questions on these could be preprinted or handwritten.  The earliest currently known example with a printed publication date is 'Mental Photographs. An Album for Confessions of Tastes, Habits and Convictions', an album published in New York in 1869, which contained place for a photograph as well as the set of questions. The albums seem to have enjoyed their greatest popularity in the following decades, but to have become unfashionable by the early years of the twentieth century.

REFERENCES:

* Confession Album (28 August 2020). Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Confession_album&oldid=975482902

* Evan, Kindley. "How the Proust Questionnaire Went from Literary Curio to Prestige Personality Quiz". The New Yorker. Retrieved 1 December 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-the-proust-questionnaire-went-from-literary-curio-to-prestige-personality-quiz

* Matthews, Samantha. Psychological Crystal Palace? Late Victorian Confession Albums. Vol. 3 (2000), pp. 125-154 (30 pages). The Johns Hopkins University Press https://www.jstor.org/stable/30227314

* R. Saxton (ed.), Mental Photographs. An Album for Confessions of Tastes, Habits and Convictions New York: Leypoldt & Holt (1869). See Kolhbecher (2007), 25-6; 28-9; 32. The questions elicited a satirical response from Mark Twain, "Mental Photographs", published in Mark Twain's Sketches, London: Routledge (1872), 148-9. Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/mentalphotograph00saxt

ML - CONFESSION ALBUM:

Here, you can find my particular version of a confession album and get closer to my  "Portrait Chinois" (Chinese Portrait).

The concept of the Chinese portrait is particularly simple: It is about detecting certain aspects of the personality or identifying a individual's tastes or preferences through a questionnaire based entirely on identification with objects, elements or people.

So, if you are curious, keep reading ...

➜  Who Am I, You Ask?

➜  The Pivot Questionnaire