ON THE GHOSTLY ALL HALLOWED EAV CREEPING SQUEEKING SNEEKING IN OLD RAGES THE GUESTS OF THE KOOKOON SPOOKES WILL ASSEMBLE IN THEIR DEN WHERE THEY WILL HALLUCINATE TO THE WOOZY WAIL OF SPECTRAL SPOOKY OLD MAN HALLOWEEN ... [caption title] de [Kokoon Arts Club]; [Auguste Leysens?] - [1926]

[Cleveland, Ohio], [1926]. First Edition. Broadside. Very good. Broadside, 11 x 15 inches. Pinholes, concentrated in upper corners, rough edges (as printed). Very good.

Poster invitation for Cleveland's Kokoon Arts Club's 1926 Halloween party, featuring a lantern-bearing ghoul unlocking the door to a subterranean chamber. The Kokoon Club, the base of much of Cleveland's early-20th-century bohemia and avant garde, was widely known in its heyday for its wild and elaborately designed social events. For more than two decades, members would compete to design the poster invitation for the large annual Bal Masque held early in the year. The more intimate Halloween parties generated a handful of smaller posters during the 1920s and early 1930s, at least four of which were almost certainly made by the same artist.

The present example is the first of that group, inviting guests to the club headquarters at 2121 East 21st Street on Saturday, October 30. The location and day of the week correspond to 1926, four years before the club moved to a new location at East 40th Street. A clue in a later year's invitation points to the artist as Auguste "Gus" Leysens (1888-1946), a Brussels-born lithographer and active member of the club from 1925 through the 1930s.

Rare, with the only known institutional copy at Kent State University.