Empty Space in House of Ghosts
Written by Marshall Weber and printed in 2000 by Christopher K. Wilde and Mark Wagner, House of Ghosts is a story of loneliness, invisibility, and introspection. It is printed on semi-transparent onion-skin paper, overlaid on the blueprints of a house.
01
Empty Space
This book is text drowning in more text. It is a denial of textual and graphic whitespace. There is pictorial whitespace in the blueprints, but it is often interrupted by overlaid text. There is no graphical whitespace whatsoever, as the pages are semi-transparent, and there is very little apparent formal structure to the page layout.
There are many times where words will be printed such that they must be read through a page. This makes those words look less opaque. This is sometimes used for artistic effect, such as the page where the text reads “Have I become a ghost in my own home?” Where all of the words except “ghost” are printed on both the front and the back of the page while “ghost” is only printed on the back, making it seem less tangible - indeed, more ghostly. The form of the text in this book creates an interesting depth of meaning: While the text is explicitly asking whether the speaker has become a ghost, the faintly printed words imply the speaker's ghostly form. When the medium of communication is written, the form that the written word takes can be analyzed almost as a tone of voice, or the speaker's affect. In this way, House of Ghosts uses its unique form to communicate more than would be possible with a prototypical book.
02
Illustrations
There is actually much more text in House of Ghosts than illustrations, to the point where it would be fair to describe it as a palimpsest made legible. The only illustrations are the blueprints of a house, which are not strictly connected to the narrative, but rather serve to set a mood and convey the way that this book is connected so deeply to the house. Even so, the blueprints contain quite a lot of text. Often, the blueprint text is just as opaque as the text from the narrative, making it difficult to distinguish between the two. However, both are still legible due to the semi-transparent paper.
There are some moments where the placement of the illustrations interacts with the placement of the text to imply further meaning, such as when the word “Ghosts” appears to be within the illustration of the house printed on the first page.
The inclusion of the blueprints makes the book almost autological, becoming itself a symbolic representation of a house of ghosts: a compilation of blueprints that has been filled with phantom words.