IN JUNE 2005 AN ITALIAN book dealer named Marino Massimo De Caro presented for sale a proof copy of Galileo Galilei’s first telescopic observations of the night sky. This publication included Galileo’s latest discoveries about the moon, never-before-seen stars, and the previously unknown moons of Jupiter. Galileo’s signature was included, and the original watercolors. It was a copy to set your heart racing.
A proof copy of Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger), originally published in March 1610 and regarded as one of the most important technical treatises produced by the human race, promised to be a major event in the history of science. De Caro easily found an interested buyer, the rare book dealer Richard Lan, who partially specializes in landmark works from the history of science. Yet for a book of this magnitude, Lan knew that authenticating the volume with due diligence extended beyond even his decades of experience. He brought in some of the world’s most respected scholars in early printed books, all eager to determine whether this copy was as game changing as they hoped.
Over the summer of 2005 the professionals conferred, the book was inspected, and a seal of approval granted. Then came the most thrilling moment of all: the deal. De Caro agreed to let his potentially ten-million-dollar copy of The Starry Messenger go for the bargain basement price of half a million dollars. It was “the acquisition of a lifetime,” Lan said.
There was one tiny catch: the treatise was fake. Beginning to end, paper to ink, De Caro had fabricated the whole thing. Over the centuries, rare book specialists have contended with things like facsimile pages, restored bindings, and pages supplied from other copies, but an entire sixty-page treatise? Forging a book of this magnitude is so unheard of that, for seven years, experts and appraisers thought the Holy Grail of scientific history had simply dropped from the sky.
Nothing illustrates the messiness of print quite like forgery. Forgers are one part intellectual, one part psychopath, equal doses narcissist and megalomaniac, with a lemon twist of hydrochloric acid thrown into the mix (more on that later). Their motivations aren’t always the same, but every decent forger has one thing in common: a wide knowledge of history. Without that, they don’t last very long.
Forging an entire book is an astronomically difficult endeavor. Simply put, there’s just too much specialized knowledge for one person (or a small army of persons) to keep track of. The forger would have to master dozens of different disciplines, from the paper, to the ink, to the binding, type, press, and illustrations (most of them saturated with more than five hundred years of quirks and technicalities), to successfully fabricate a book. One slipup, anywhere along the way, and the deception is revealed.
Run-of-the-mill forgers are more likely to set their sights on easier pursuits, such as single documents, sports signatures, or robbing the Federal Reserve. But for every crime with a horrible chance for success, there’s always someone out there willing to give it a try. Sometimes these attempts end up as hilarious viral videos. Other times someone actually gets away with selling a fake copy of Galileo’s seventeenth-century Starry Messenger—for a time, anyway.
What sets De Caro’s Sidereus Nuncius apart from most other forged books (including similar attempts, such as De Caro’s forgeries of Galileo’s treatises on the geometrical compass) is the sheer magnitude of the ruse. Traveling between Italy and Argentina over a period of two years, De Caro and a handful of alleged conspirators meticulously handcrafted their very own seventeenth-century Venetian imprint. When the fake was finally uncovered in 2012, the word masterpiece was thrown around by some of the experts who were first fooled. Other scholars, for their part, would be embarrassed that it took so long to pull back the curtain on De Caro’s wizard.
Fabricating a rare book is like forging a world-famous painting . . . if you also have to re-create the museum it’s housed in, right down to historically accurate light fixtures and doorknobs. Traditionally, most rare books have been much more expensive to forge than they are actually worth. This is partly why De Caro wasn’t immediately caught. Scholars weren’t looking for a forgery. Who in their right mind would go to such great lengths to fake a whole book? A criminal, it turns out, who thought he was smarter than everyone else in the rare book world, and was willing to put this belief to the test.
BORN IN Italy in 1973, Marino Massimo De Caro is, by many accounts, a very likeable guy. He is tall and heavy-set, with blue eyes and a face that could pass for that of either a kindly book dealer or, with a fedora and furrowed brow, an enforcer for the Corleone family. De Caro entered politics at the ripe age of twenty-two, and even those who later would be swindled by him have described him as a socially gifted young man.
De Caro’s involvement with rare books took off at age twenty-five, when he dropped out of law school, took a menial job working in a pension office in Verona, and began frequenting the shops of local book dealers. The next year he was traveling to international book fairs as a collector. Four years later, he was brokering book deals worth over a million dollars. Two years after that, he offered his fake copy of Sidereus Nuncius for sale.
De Caro’s choice of Galileo was anything but serendipitous. He claims that, ever since he was a boy, his admiration for the seventeenth-century Father of Modern Science bordered on obsession. While most American teenagers in the 1980s were reading a mixed bag of The Scarlet Letter, X-Men, and Playboy, De Caro boasts he was sitting in a library picking his way through 4,200 pages of Galileo’s known letters. In 2007 he would publish a two-volume biography of Galileo, a labor of love that William Shea, a Galileo expert, would later compare to “an extended undergraduate paper with no quotations—the kind of thing an American student would pull off the Internet.”
An astronomer who lived three hundred-plus years earlier became De Caro’s moral compass. De Caro saw Galileo as a nonconformist and a rebel—the original rebel, really. James Dean, with his tousled bouffant and head-on collisions, had nothing on Galileo, with his receding hairline and peaceful death in bed from heart palpitations. In De Caro’s estimation, Galileo was a giant among men—which, coincidentally, was also Galileo’s estimation of himself.
Don’t get us wrong: Galileo is worthy of admiration. He was a visionary who had to fight to convince people of the realities he observed through his telescope. His support of Copernicus’s theory that the sun does not revolve around the earth is one of his more famous fights. It is worth noting, too, that during his struggles against the Catholic Church, Galileo called his priestly critics “mental pygmies,” “dumb mooncalves,” and persons “hardly deserving to be called human beings.” This could only have endeared him more to the teenage De Caro. As a brilliant man who was “vehemently suspected” of heresy, Galileo became De Caro’s patron saint of Science and Rebellion and Sticking It To The Man. “I wanted to use the philosophy of Galileo against [the scholars],” De Caro claimed to New Yorker reporter Nicholas Schmidle after De Caro’s crimes were uncovered.
Defending forgery, embezzlement, and petty larceny by pointing to Galileo’s lifelong struggle to drag the Catholic Church kicking and screaming into the Scientific Revolution is a weak justification for his crimes. Nevertheless, De Caro tried to position himself as a modern-day Galileo, fighting his own “mental pygmies”—who, in his mind, constituted all the scholars alive in the world today. Instead of blasting them with a groundbreaking scientific treatise, however, he would boldly fake someone else’s groundbreaking scientific treatise and sell it at a fraction of its current market value. The fools!
Let’s not kid ourselves. It was more likely about the money.
As the director of the Biblioteca Girolamini in Naples, and using connections he made with libraries all around Italy, De Caro began systematically stealing authentic imprints by Galileo and other writers. His thefts initially went unnoticed because he replaced these authentic editions with his forgeries. This strategy allowed him to sell real Galileos without risking his fakes on the open market.
And that market was ravenous. In recent years, collectors have craved the “high spots,” that is, the best-known and most beloved books within any given subject. For literature, this means books such as Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. For exploration, it means the accounts of Lewis and Clark’s expedition or Captain Cook’s voyages. In the past twenty years, major works in the history of science have jumped in popularity in the rare book world. To misquote the esteemed fashion mogul Jacobim Mugatu from Zoolander, “Science, so hot right now. Science.” Copies of the first edition in English of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, the work that first outlined the laws of motion and gravity, were being sold by dealers for around twenty thousand dollars in the late 1990s. Yet comparable copies were being sold by those same dealers in the early 2010s for around seventy-five thousand. Not every book has seen such an incredible jump; in fact, it’s rather unusual. Yet when you combine two major collecting trends (in this case science and high spots), the market loses its goddamn mind. Thus, to a rare book dealer, De Caro’s choice of Galileo as the subject of his forgeries reads more “criminal trying to get the most bang for his buck” and less “Galileo is my hero, OMG, I want to be just like him!”
When forging a book such as Galileo’s, one of the most obvious places to start is the paper. De Caro knew this, and reportedly studied papermaking by hand in Italy. He took this knowledge to Argentina, where he enlisted the help of a book dealer—allegedly; the case still hasn’t been brought to trial—and a local artist. Together they manufactured authentic-looking sheets of “rag paper” to use in the Galileo forgery.
Four hundred years ago, paper was made from rags (or, technically, the cloth fibers that make up rags). Rag paper sounds like something cheap, but in fact, it’s quite the opposite. In comparison to what we use today, rag paper was downright luscious, often thick and soft to the touch. This is one of the main reasons so many early printed books are missing blank leaves: owners would cut them out to use them for other purposes. A perfectly good piece of expensive paper, just sitting there not being used? What a waste! In the world of rare books, many collectors will still consider buying a fifteenth-century printed book that is missing blank leaves. That’s not the case for incomplete books from the nineteenth-century; collectors flee from them like they’ve just seen It peering out of a storm drain. Each time period has its own rules for collecting. What’s okay in one era isn’t necessarily okay in another.
Back in Galileo’s time paper was so expensive that, when printing a book, the cost of the paper could easily equal the cost of everything else combined, including the labor of the compositors and pressmen. The cost of paper varied depending on the quality of the cloth rags broken down and reformed into paper. The nicer the rags, the nicer (and more expensive) the paper.
Scarcity of supply was a constant problem for paper manufacturers. The sixteenth-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, who founded a paper mill for printing his own books, requested donations so often that his pleas were nicknamed “rag sermons.” As the need for paper grew, men, women, and children of the lower classes were often employed as rag pickers, making their living sifting through refuse piles to find bits of cloth to sell to the paper mills. If you happened to be employed as a young rag picker (and we use the term employed here loosely), you would be keeping your seven-year-old eyes open for linen cloth, the diamonds of the garbage heap.
Clothing in the seventeenth century was made primarily of wool (from sheep) or linen (from the fibers of the flax plant). Wool fibers were not ideal for paper production because they gummed up and matted together when wet. Linen worked quite well, though. This meant that paper mills could transform old stockings and used underwear into books, newspapers, and treatises that revolutionized the very foundation of scientific understanding. This is one of the reasons that paper from the first few hundred years of print can feel so delectably supple: its texture resembles that of fabric (read: your favorite pair of underwear) more than the paper we use today.
Just like most forgers, De Caro would have known that 1844 marks an important date in the development of paper production. That was the year when wood pulp was successfully added to the industrial production of paper. Wood was much easier to obtain, so its inclusion made papermaking enormously cheaper. Of course, the paper feels different as a result. Add sawdust to a loaf of bread, for example, and it won’t “taste better” or “be palatable in any way,” but it will be more economical to produce. Replace linen rags with wood pulp, mix in a healthy dose of the Industrial Revolution, and voilà!, you get a cheaper, mass-produced, gross-tasting paper. And yes, we learned that last tidbit from experience: not by eating paper ourselves, but by observing which books have been eaten by something else.
Allow us to explain.
Wormholing is the term that bookdealers use when describing paper damage caused by book-boring insects. These “bookworms” like to munch tunnels through nice, clean cloth, but for some reason have an aversion to chemically bleached industrial wood pulp. Unsurprisingly, wormholing can be found commonly enough in books, especially those from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but by the nineteenth century it pretty well disappeared. While evidence of wormholing isn’t exactly preferred by collectors, it rarely hurts the value of the book in a significant way.
Not only did bookworms take a blow from the introduction of wood pulp to paper, but so, too, did those little ragpickers from the refuse dumps. “Picking” took a downturn, and countless trash-sorting children sadly found themselves unemployed. (Cheer up, kids, you’re just in time for the Industrial Revolution, when there will be plenty of bone-grinding machines that need tiny fingers to clean them.)
The introduction of wood pulp inevitably changed the tactile sensation of paper. If you were holding an 1885 first edition of Huckleberry Finn, for example, the pages would feel noticeably stiffer than the pages of an 1818 first edition of Frankenstein. The paper used in the latter would be rag-based, and therefore softer to the touch. If you’re a collector, such details are all part of the joy of discovery. For a forger, however, they’re a nearly insurmountable challenge. One of De Caro’s other Galileo forgeries was uncovered in part by the out-of-place stiffness of his paper.
It would also be hard to miss the difference in smell over time. Think about the oldest book you own. For most people who are not rare book dealers, this would possibly be a beloved childhood copy of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps that you found in the back of your closet. You slowly crack open those pages, and you can just smell how great the paper is. Such a wonderful moment. This is how a book is supposed to smell, you think. All nostalgic and well worn and luxurious.
Well, you’re wrong. You’re not smelling luxury when you crack open those aged pages; you’re smelling the inherent cheapness of paper. Wood pulp contains an aromatic organic polymer called lignin, which gives paper made after 1844 a vanilla-like smell over time. While this aroma is one of the single most pleasant experiences to a modern-day bibliophile, for most of the history of print that smell did not exist in books because they weren’t composed of materials with a high percentage of lignin. You didn’t want pretty smells in your books. You didn’t want any smells in your books. Besides the scent produced by lignin, odors are most often indicative of dirt, mold, or other unpleasant things an elementary school student might rub into her Scholastic copy of Goosebumps.
At least by the time he forged Sidereus Nuncius, De Caro was aware of the major pitfalls of fabricating seventeenth-century paper. He would have known that wood pulp was a dead giveaway, so, instead, he selected handcrafted rag paper. But the details always get complicated when it comes to the history of print. The definition of the word rag in papermaking has changed a bit over the past four hundred years, and this little fact became one of the most damning pieces of evidence against De Caro. The rag of Galileo’s day was made mostly from bast fibers, the basis for linen fabrics. The rag of today is most commonly made of cotton linters. Having cotton in your Galileo forgery doesn’t necessarily reveal the fraud, as both cotton and hemp were used to a degree in paper production at the time. But cotton linters are a smoking gun. As they might say on CSI: Miami, “That’s why De Caro wasn’t able to [puts sunglasses on] pull the cotton wool over everyone’s eyes for long.” (That will be the last pun in our book. That is cotton-based.)
Cotton linters are the thin, velvety fibers that remain stuck to the cotton seed after the ginning process. Separating cotton from its seeds manually has always been difficult and time-consuming, so the 1793 invention of the modern mechanical cotton gin was a major breakthrough for the papermaking industry. The machine used a roller combined with a sort of grid through which metal spikes pulled the cotton fibers free from the seeds. Unfortunately for De Caro, the cotton gin was invented one hundred eighty years after Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius was published. Worse still, the machines used to separate linters after ginning weren’t even available until the nineteenth century. These silky cotton scraps are a primary fiber source for making rag paper today, but they are anachronistic red flags in any book supposedly printed in 1610.
Sometimes we see what we want to see, however. With a little pigment coloring, a spell in a kitchen oven at 480 degrees Fahrenheit, and a dash of dirt rubbed into the corners and gutters of the pages, De Caro “aged” his paper convincingly enough that experts initially overlooked the presence of the cotton linters. Later inspection would reveal the rather elementary faux aging techniques that De Caro used. Even invisible fingerprints left by the forger were discovered, glowing brightly under UVA light.
For anyone to accept his forgery, De Caro knew that he would have to create a convincing and functional printing ink. Johannes Gutenberg came to a similar conclusion five and a half centuries earlier, though with presumably less criminal intent or Italian swagger.
Inks had been in use for thousands of years before Gutenberg’s press. Ingenious methods had been developed to add lasting pigment to inks, which included the color sepia extracted from cuttlefish, purple extracted from mollusks, gold from fish bile, red from cinnabar ore, blue from indigo plants, and yellow from saffron flowers. The black that went into writing inks came mostly from soot or iron salts.
In the Europe of Gutenberg’s day, iron gall inks (used primarily as writing ink) could be made only with the assistance of the female gall wasp. In order to reproduce, the gall wasp must lay her eggs into a tree, most often oak. A fairly mysterious process takes place wherein the site of the injection swells, filling with nutrients for the larva inside, which will break free from the hardened protuberance (the gall or nut) when it’s fully developed. (The scientific term for this is not “busting a nut,” but c’mon, it should be.)
Ink makers collected these unbusted oak galls, ground them up, and soaked them in water to extract the tannic acid, which was mixed with iron for coloring and bound with a vegetable gum. As widespread as iron gall was at the time of Gutenberg, however, writing inks were not ideal for use on a printing press. For one thing, the tannic acid was unsuitably strong. (Fans of Alien know that acid and metal are not friends under any circumstances.) Over time, the iron gall would eat away not only the metal type of a press, but also the fibers of the paper.
Binding properties were another problem Gutenberg faced with water-based inks such as iron gall. Printing ink has to be sufficiently fatty, or it won’t stick to the metal type. Bucking the popular inks of his day, Gutenberg created his own formula, a recipe whose precise makeup, incidentally, remains a mystery today. Recent tests suggest that his secret formula may have been most closely related to oil paints used by local artists.
Over the years, testing of antique inks has uncovered some fairly strange additives—for example, human urine. Why would you ever find urine in ink? Because the large leather balls used to transfer ink to the metal type of the press (looking not unlike comically oversize candied apples) had a tendency to become stiff and cracked over time. And what’s the best way to maintain the suppleness and youthful appearance of leather? Soaking it in pee. Apparently.
As he was creating the first printing ink, Gutenberg realized that vegetable oil would provide the fatty substance necessary to allow printing ink to stick to metal type. Along with the press itself and movable type, this ink was Gutenberg’s most important innovation, one that allowed for the success of his printing press in Europe. Linseed oil (expressed from flaxseed) was the primary vehicle for antique printing inks. Colored with carbon soot, this rich black ink served the world of printing since the 1400s. Not until the twentieth century did petroleum-based inks gain traction.
Because the basic composition of printing ink changed so little over the first five hundred years of movable type, De Caro was able to hide his Galileo forgery within a generous margin of ink error (think of kids playing hide-and-seek with the boundaries set as all of North America). It was virtually impossible for researchers to determine if De Caro’s book had been printed with fraudulent ink. Tests do exist that can give a clearer picture of an ink’s age (e.g., C-14 analysis), but those tests require invasive procedures. When you’ve potentially got the world’s most breathtaking new discovery in the history of science in your hands, you tend to avoid slicing off pieces of it. Thus the printing ink was taken at face value, without further testing.
But De Caro still had to contend with an additional kind of ink for those fake Galileo watercolors—which would be scrutinized by the world’s most respected art historians. De Caro claimed that, with the help of an alleged accomplice in Argentina who had a background in pharmacology, he began testing the acidity levels of different inks available on the open market. For the watercolors, De Caro chose an India ink dating back to the 1800s that, when compared to modern inks, tested acceptably high on acid. Following a line of thinking that could be described in similar terms, De Caro resolved to find a way to age that ink artificially by two hundred years, transforming his unremarkable India ink into seemingly authentic seventeenth-century Galileo watercolors. And like many a harebrained alchemical scheme, his work started in the kitchen. With hydrochloric acid.
De Caro says he placed the forged pages, with their dark, fresh ink, on the top rack of a totally ordinary oven, then inserted a glass baking dish on the bottom that contained hydrochloric acid. Cranking the oven up to 480 degrees, he cooked the pages. The rising fumes from the acid oxidized the fresh ink, transforming it into a toasty sepia brown. In a kind of reverse Fountain of Youth, twenty minutes of roasting acid is equivalent to about four hundred years of natural aging. In the end, De Caro achieved the perfect marshmallow finish to his paper, and no one could easily dispute that the ink on his pages wasn’t placed there in Italy in the year 1610.
After this hydrochloric sleight of hand, De Caro might have gotten away with his forgery if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids! Nope, wrong forgery case. De Caro might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t tried to fabricate an entire book, complete with Galileo’s signature, original illustrations, binding, and replica stamp from the personal library of Federico Cesi (Galileo’s patron and founder of one of the most important scientific fraternities in seventeenth-century Rome). With so many variables, De Caro was bound to make a mistake (well, many mistakes actually) along the way.
That’s not to say he didn’t take clever shortcuts. Rather than fabricate the book binding from scratch, he found one that already existed. Also, he nestled his forgery among authentic Galileo works, all of which were subsequently bound together as a Sammelband in an actual seventeenth-century vellum binding. This is the literary equivalent of a turducken: a forgery inside an anthology inside a genuine leather cover.
Minute differences in sewing techniques and threads would later form some of the most unequivocal evidence proving the fraud. Initial investigations, however, took for granted that the binding was authentic to the time period. Just as De Caro had hoped. After all, why go to the effort of fabricating “antique” leather and cardboard when you can let some poor schmuck from the seventeenth century do it for you?
Back before humanity discovered cardboard (an important date to mark on your calendar, along with other man-made materials such as plastic, neoprene, and whatever the hell is in chicken nuggets), the boards forming the front and back covers of a book were made from heavy, relatively expensive slats of wood. It’s amazing to handle a book with wooden boards: the weight in your hands works as a sort of sensory subtext, making the book seem that much more impressive. But after the explosion of print in Europe, these wooden covers would prove economically and physically impractical. Just think of all those poor schoolchildren having to carry around textbooks weighing fifteen pounds apiece. (Kidding. Those kids didn’t go to school; they picked through garbage heaps so books could be made for rich white guys.)
In order to cut costs and facilitate production, printers replaced the wooden slats with cartonnage (basically cardboard with a consistency closer to papier-mâché). But no gentrified man worth his weight in neck doilies would be caught dead carrying around a cardboard book, so binders covered the unsightly boards with a material as beautiful as it was sturdy: leather.
Today, most books are covered with decorative paper. About a hundred fifty years ago, cloth was the preferred material. For the hundreds of years before that, leather ruled the world of bookbinding.
As collectors of earlier imprints know, leathers from different sources result in different physical traits. One of the primary materials used in the early years of printing was vellum, made from the skins of calves, sheep, goats, or any convenient hide of high quality. Vellum tends not to be dyed, so these bindings most often appear white or cream colored. Some vellum bindings are so starkly white that they seem to glow like resplendent angels. Resplendent angels wearing something else’s skin, but angels nonetheless.
When cowhide is tanned (instead of degreased), it’s not called vellum; it’s called calf, which is the most common leather binding. Now, if an eighteenth-century book owner wanted something really fancy, he’d choose morocco, made from goatskin. Morocco is a more expensive material, known for taking dye much better than other types of leather. Morocco bindings are truly stunning in their vibrant blues, greens, and reds. It’s a pretty safe bet that if you see a shelf of leather-bound books in these hues, it’s filled with morocco volumes.
Pigskin was occasionally used in certain locations, especially during the first few centuries of print. A blind-tooled alum-tawed German pigskin binding from the sixteenth century is a magnificent sight. That description probably means little outside the rare book world today, but it sure meant something to a sixteenth-century Jew looking to bind his copy of the Talmud. There have actually been cases when pigskin was used as the covering to books of Jewish scripture—which technically would have made their holy book no longer kosher. Unsurprisingly, European binders were more accommodating to their Gentile clientele, and at times that clientele had very specific tastes when it came to bindings. Books of erotica, for example, were sometimes bound in fur. Because of course they were.
De Caro’s Sidereus Nuncius was not bound in fur (which would have been indicative of more “terrestrial” telescopic observations on Galileo’s part); it was bound in vellum. Yet, baby farm animals weren’t the only ones being used for bookbindings. Any animal that could be skinned has probably ended up around a book at one time or another. The skins of buffalo, snake, shark, salmon, frog, eel, and wallaby have all been used to bind books, as has ostrich shin (not skin, mind you, shin).
While rather uncommon, and obviously unethical, there are even examples of human skin being used as book leather. One American specimen comes from the Narrative of the Life of James Allen, a memoir of a nineteenth-century highwayman written while he was in prison awaiting execution. This armed robber had finally been brought to justice with the help of a man named John Fenno. Prior to his execution, Allen requested that his memoir be bound in his own skin and delivered to the man who had helped capture him. The book, completed in Boston in 1837, was indeed bound in Allen’s skin, and delivered to and kept by the Fenno family for about seventy years before being donated to the Boston Athenaeum.
While owning a book made from human skin might justifiably make your own skin crawl, the more important question is: Who in God’s name made the binding leather from James Allen? Who pulled his body out of the execution chamber and thought, Well, it was his final wish, so I’ll just go ahead and make a book out of him? James Allen the highwayman was dead, but the monster who skinned him, dried out his hide, and then sewed it into a book was walking the streets of nineteenth-century Boston. Freely.
Thankfully for De Caro, vellum was a perfectly acceptable binding for Galileo’s seventeenth-century anthology. He just had to ensure that his treatise fit seamlessly among the authentic sections. In order to accomplish this, he needed to address the edges of the book.
Historically, a book’s edges have been a canvas for displaying wealth. Gilt decoration, in which gold is applied to the outer edges of the text block, immediately comes to mind. In many books, only the top edge will be gilt. This serves two purposes: to make it beautiful (very important) and to form an extra barrier to keep dust out of the pages. In order to trick out his reconstructed anthology (but, really, to cover up the scars of his Shelleyesque book surgery), De Caro inserted his forgery, cut five millimeters off the fore-edge of the entire text block, gilded the sucker, and pressed a decorative pattern into the gilt, a technique known as gauffering. This made it appear that both the authentic pages and the forged pages of the anthology had all been cut, gilded, and gauffered at the same time. Which they were. Just four hundred years later than the Italian book dealer was claiming.
De Caro chose to decorate the fore-edge of his text block with a spotted, abstract design that fit the era of the binding, but there are other, more elaborate ways a wealthy patron might display his status on a book’s edges. An artist could be hired to create a one-of-a-kind fore-edge painting, for example. These strange works of art are made so that they’re indiscernible when viewed directly from the front, but bend the block of pages in just the right way and—voilà! A secret painting appears!
Scenes of quotidian life, landscapes, religious motifs, and floral panoramas were common enough, but if someone shelled out the cash for an artist to hand-paint a concealed scene onto a book’s fore-edge, what do you think a favorite subject would have been? If you guessed porn, then here’s a gold star for you. Scenes of erotica were a popular subject for hidden paintings in books. Because nothing classes up your 1893 edition of The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow like gentlemen and gentlewomen fornicating on the fore-edge.
From 2005 to 2012, the book dealer Richard Lan sent De Caro’s Sidereus Nuncius to scholars and forensic investigators on two continents for inspection. De Caro’s was perhaps the most successful book forgery of modern times, but he was still caught. Once doubt crept into the minds of the experts, it took only a few weeks for them to unmask a forgery that had taken more than two years to create.
Ultimately, it was small technical developments made throughout the hundreds of years of Western printing that undid De Caro’s multimillion-dollar fake. In retrospect, a number of the fooled scholars were mortified to admit that there were signs everywhere. The depth of the pressed type, a faulty capital P, the sewing pattern on the binding, even the absence of wax on the binding thread became kindling for De Caro’s eventual and inevitable immolation. Yet the book dealer’s fall wasn’t entirely a result of gaps in his knowledge of the history of print. Flawed people created that history, and in the end, De Caro proved to be De Caro’s worst enemy.
Conmen like to produce a clever story to hide their real intentions. After the forgery was discovered, De Caro made the claim that he had “inserted a minor error or two,” thinking that if he didn’t, it would be impossible for history ever to uncover his masterful deceit. In a work of absolute perfection (which his Sidereus Nuncius was in fact not), De Caro asserted that minute marks of imperfection had to be added in order to balance out the universe. Like some kind of holy stigmata, a blemish would linger in the midst of perfection, reminding the common folk of the human origin of De Caro’s work.
On the personal stamp of Federico Cesi, the storied owner of the Galileo anthology, De Caro and his alleged colleagues closed a tiny gap in the inner decorative border, one that is left open in every other authentic example of the Cesi bookplate. Because stigmata come in twos, he included a typo on the title page, changing the Latin word periodis (meaning “periods,” as in “orbit times”) to pepiodis (meaning jack-shit nothing because it’s not a real word). De Caro claims that this was his personal finger in the eye of the academic community. He has also asserted that this taunting of academia’s “mental pygmies” was the real motivation behind his forgery. This explanation is widely believed by the scholars involved in the book’s examination. “It is our thesis,” goes the definitive study debunking the 2005 Sidereus Nuncius, “that the [forgery] is a projected duel with the community of specialists.”
This is likely dramatic overstatement by both parties. The explanation for the forgery is probably much duller: money. New technologies such as photopolymer plates (a type of plastic sheet made through photographic processes) can re-create the look of a printed page and are much cheaper and easier to obtain than an actual printing press and the necessary fonts. Because of this, and the potential money to be made, someone, eventually, was going to try to fool the world with a forged rare book.
Hubris lurks in the heart of every forger. Forgers must believe they are smarter than everyone else, more meticulous in their details than even the experts in their fields. If this weren’t the case, they would never have the confidence to become . . . well, confidence men. Now that he’s been caught, De Caro has tried to write the whole thing off as a joke, claiming that only a “real expert” could bring him down.
Unfortunately for him, a “real expert” happened to be working in Georgia at the time. Both the Cesi stamp and the “pepiodis” typo caught the eye of Nick Wilding, a historian of science at Georgia State University, and a specialist in Renaissance studies. Initially, senior scholars blew off Wilding’s concerns. For example, the Cesi bookplate could be wrong without the entire printed treatise being forged. What were such quibbles next to one of the world’s most respected art historians assuring the world that the watercolors of the moon had been created by Galileo himself? It was a fantasy come true . . . the key word here being fantasy.
Wilding persisted, however, and began a series of discussions with one of the leading scholars on the project, Paul Needham. Skeptical at first, Needham nevertheless listened, and decided that there were enough red flags to take another look at De Caro’s copy. He took it to Columbia University and examined it next to an undisputed first edition. “With the two copies placed side by side, one feature after another . . . began to look suspicious, and within about twenty minutes Needham felt certain that [De Caro’s copy] was a modern forgery.” A flurry of emails followed between Wilding, Needham, Lan, and other experts throughout the United States and Europe. Once the excitement from one of the greatest finds in the history of science had worn off and the experts took a second look, this time primed for doubt, they easily broke the hollow façade of De Caro’s forgery.
So it was that in 2014, the initial study that celebrated the discovery of this Galileo “proof copy” had to be supplemented with a volume that basically debunked everything that had come before. The correction reads like a confession from some of the world’s most eminent book historians in the depths of serious soul searching: “not many results are worse than a refuted authentication.” As Wilding himself has noted, labeling the forgery a “masterpiece” is one way the humbled scholars licked their wounds: in other words, only a masterpiece could have fooled them.
Humanity’s capacity for brilliance is perhaps matched only by the depth of our egoism. Both materialize in the books we print—or, in the case of the Sidereus Nuncius, pretend to print. De Caro tried to pattern his life philosophy after that of Galileo Galilei. How this extended to international book forgery is a bit of an open question, but in the end, the two men did have at least one thing in common: their sentencing. Galileo, the Father of Modern Science, was sentenced to nine years’ house arrest by the Roman Inquisition for heliocentric heresy. De Caro, not the Father of anything, was sentenced to seven years’ house arrest by a much less notorious Italian court for being a thief.