CHAPTER THIRTEEN

FAKES, FORGERIES, AND FACSIMILES

Fakes, forgeries, and facsimiles do not, fortunately, plague the collector of twentieth-century material as much as they do collectors of earlier material, or even collectors of objects other than books. Still, there is enough of this sort of thing around to warrant some discussion of it.

Forgeries may be defined as spurious productions of books or pamphlets that never actually existed, as opposed to fakes which are conscious reproductions of items made at a later date with the intention of deception. Quite often a facsimile—which has been honestly issued as such—will be manipulated or doctored into a fake. But more about that later. Outright forgeries, the creation of books or pamphlets that never existed, are seldom encountered, thank heaven! But there have been two major attempts to create them, one in the nineteenth century and, surprisingly enough, one in the 1960s. The amazing thing about these two attempts is that the perpetrators employed exactly the same ideas and techniques, and were discovered and tripped up by exactly the same detective tactics.

The earlier forger was the now notorious Thomas J. Wise, certainly one of the least likely candidates for the role. Wise, a businessman of some means, was the leading British bibliophile in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He held every position of honor in the field, and rightly so, as author of comprehensive pioneering bibliographies of such authors as Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin, Swinburne, Wordsworth, and other contemporary writers, all of whom were at that time just beginning to be collected seriously. Wise’s bibliographies were based on his own magnificent collections, unrivaled for scope and depth. But some flaw in Wise’s character led him astray and ultimately negated all his accomplishments, to the point where he is now principally remembered as one of the most unscrupulous forgers of all time. For reasons we shall probably never know, he began issuing little pamphlets that purported to be early rarities of important Victorian authors, all dated in the 1840s and 1850s. None of them actually appeared before 1888, however, and each one that surfaced was somehow “discovered” by Wise and parceled out by him to eager collectors. This went on for a considerable number of years; in fact, for several decades. Not until the early 1930s, when two serious doubters and students of bibliography had assembled enough evidence to publish a book modestly entitled An Enquiry Into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets was he at last unmasked. Written by John Carter and Graham Pollard, An Enquiry appeared in 1934 and was the biggest bombshell ever to hit the book-collecting world.

Improbabilities concerning the Wise pamphlets had already touched off a certain amount of suspicion. For instance, the most famous of them, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, supposedly had been issued in Reading in 1847, three years prior to the earliest known appearance of these poems. Yet not a single copy bore an inscription, although the edition was purportedly “not for sale” and produced for Mrs. Browning’s private distribution among her friends. Further, all the copies were in superb condition, showing no signs of ever having been read. This was also the case with most of the other pamphlets. While such facts may cause suspicion, they are not legally damning, but they inspired Carter and Pollard to employ modern scientific methods to make a case against Wise. A chemical analysis of the paper from one of the Browning pamphlets—and God bless the one rare-book librarian who had courage enough to snip a small strip from her copy—proved that it had been manufactured long after 1847, when the book was presumably printed. Then there was the evidence of the typefaces, which also could be demonstrated not to have been in use until long after the imprint dates of the pamphlets. Wise refused all comment, and died shortly afterward in disgrace. Ironically, Wise’s fame is such that his forgeries today are collected in their own right; a “genuine Wise forgery” may bring more now than it did in the days when an unsuspecting collector believed he was buying a genuine early rarity.

Two pamphlets forged by Thomas J. Wise late in the nineteenth century. Courtesy of the Grolier Club.

No serious attempt at anything similar occurred until the late 1960s. Back in the 1930s, in fact almost precisely at the time when the Wise scandal broke, a young poet-novelist named Frederic Prokosch commissioned the printing, quite legitimately and with the knowledge and permission of the various authors concerned, of a series of small pamphlets of poems by such poets as W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats. The pamphlets were always limited to an extremely small number of copies (usually twenty or twenty-two—although there is beginning to be a suspicion that there may have been some duplication of numbers), printed on a variety of papers. Prokosch was personally acquainted with the poets, and copies of most of the pamphlets exist with genuine presentation inscriptions dated at the time of issuance. A choice copy is T. S. Eliot’s Two Songs, inscribed by the author to the then-fledgling W. H. Auden on the eve of the latter’s birthday. As the pamphlets were known and catalogued immediately upon publication, there can be no question that they were genuine.

A genuine T. S. Eliot pamphlet published by Frederic Prokosch in 1934, inscribed by Eliot to Auden and dated. From the author’s collection.

However, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, additional Prokosch pamphlets by these poets suddenly began appearing at auction, along with titles by other authors not previously known to have been published by him. They appeared chiefly in sales at one of the principal London auction galleries, where most of them were bought by one of the oldest and most honored of British booksellers. At first, collectors were dismayed. Here was a whole series of hitherto unknown and important items—and there were virtually none to be had. What was one to do, when one prided oneself on having a complete author collection—and that collection had suddenly developed an expensive, and perhaps unfillable, gap? I had such collections of Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein, each of whom now appeared to have permitted a “Prokosch” pamphlet. Gradually, as the first shock wore off, experienced dealers and seasoned collectors began to be suspicious. It seemed odd in the extreme, with the earlier pamphlets well documented since the date of their imprints, that these had never come to light before. Some of the pamphlets had in addition a manuscript note, apparently in Prokosch’s own hand, describing the exact circumstances in which each had been printed, at various towns in Europe, between 1934 and 1940. All this added color to the supposition that more pamphlets had been printed than had previously been known. Inevitably collectors, bibliographers, and other experts discussed these new rarities, and inevitably, each voiced his suspicion. For my own part, having been for many years an avid collector of the works of both Stein and Moore, I found it hard to believe that I would never have heard of these had they legitimately existed. Both ladies were meticulous with regard to their own publications, and had Miss Moore, a longtime friend, known of their existence, she would certainly have at least shown me one, if not given me a copy. With respect to Gertrude Stein, the evidence against such a pamphlet was even more weighty. Being convinced of her own genius and immortality from the very beginning, she preserved every scrap of paper she ever received—every letter, card, note, and household bill, right down to the bills for the clipping and grooming of her pet poodle, Basket. She also religiously kept all her manuscripts, written in longhand in school notebooks. These were then transcribed by the faithful Alice Toklas into typewritten copies to send out for possible publication. In all of her massive archive, carefully stored at Yale, fully catalogued, there is no correspondence from Prokosch about any such publication, nor any trace of the poem he issued under her name. Prokosch claimed that he lost the manuscript of “Lily” (the title of the poem he caused to be printed). It does not even sound like genuine Stein, thus posing the possibility of a double forgery—not only of the imprint, but also of the text as well.

All this came into the open when a supposedly complete set of these pamphlets was put up for sale on 1 May 1972. The majority were bought by Bernard Quaritch, Ltd. of London ; Arthur Freeman, of that firm, doubtful from the first, asked Nicolas Barker, editor of The Book Collector and a bibliographer specializing in the analysis of the physical attributes of books, to examine them. As with the Wise forgeries, Mr. Barker was now able to establish that typeface, paper, or text condemned 75 percent of the pamphlets as manufactured later than the date on the title page. Mr. Barker’s account of the entire episode is scheduled for publication soon.

In the United States, in the 1960s, a series of piracies—that is, books issued in violation of copyright—were issued by the New York firm of Haskell House. These were not intended to defraud collectors, since for the most part they did not attempt to reproduce the formats of the original editions. They were intended primarily to fill the demand for scarce, out-of-print texts. The technique was to photocopy a first edition, sometimes in the same size and approximate format, sometimes in larger or smaller size. This firm flourished for a few years, long enough to issue at one point a catalog listing a hundred of these productions. Eventually they were forced to desist when they started issuing titles by Eliot, Stein, and other authors whose estates or literary executors took offense. Some of these books are of interest to in-depth collectors who want every imprint of a title. In the main they are not dangerous, for they cannot possibly fool a collector of even small experience.

Somewhat more serious to collectors is the matter of fakes—that is, the sale of a reproduction as an original. This occurs fairly often in other collecting fields—notably antiques, paintings, and stamps. Generally speaking, for most books the expense of the faking is prohibitive. To set up type, print pages, bind the book, and go through all the necessary mechanics normally involves so much time and labor that the process is self-defeating. Naturally, the simpler the production format, the greater the chance there is that a fake can be produced. Pamphlets are easier to make than hardbound books, and mimeographed items easier still. It is in this last category that some fakes have been produced, especially since the mimeograph revolution of the late fifties. Mimeography was one of the principal methods employed by the Beats to issue their works. To my knowledge, however, only one fake of a mimeographed rarity has been identified definitely—an early book by Larry Eigner entitled Look at the Park, where the stencils were retyped, run again, and reissued in identical format. Luckily for collectors, a slight error was made on the reissue: it was stapled at the top left corner only. The original had been stapled all along the left side. The telltale staple holes in the upper corner make identification of this fake very easy. But there well may be other mimeographed fakes in existence that have never been identified.

The conversion of honest facsimiles into fakes is another matter and once again it is not something easily accomplished in the case of bound books. To begin with, very few facsimiles are issued, and those that are usually have various kinds of marking on them so as to render faking difficult, although, of course, not totally impossible. The gambit is rare enough, however, not to need further elaboration here. In most cases, attempted conversions of facsimiles into fakes are so clumsy as to be obvious to almost any collector with a modicum of experience.

The area where there is, alas, a considerable amount of dishonesty and faking is in the field of signed or inscribed copies. This mainly takes the form of forged signatures in books that are genuine. While entire inscriptions can be forged, they are much more difficult to accomplish than signatures and much easier to identify as fraudulent. What usually appears is merely a forged signature copied, with varying degrees of skill, from a genuine specimen. The model is usually a signature in a signed limited edition because there is generally no question of its genuineness. (Not that there is never a question in such a case: In one notorious instance, Delacorte Press in 1967 announced a signed limited edition of A Christmas Story by Katherine Anne Porter, illustrated by Ben Shahn, to be signed by both. Shahn signed all five hundred of the copies, but Miss Porter became ill and could not sign them. As this was an item aimed specifically at the Christmas market it would have been disastrous to have waited for her to recover. So a modern “auto-pen” was employed, a mechanical device that copies the signature fed into it. Such machines are sometimes used by busy executives who must sign great numbers of letters and became well known to the collecting field when employed by the late President Kennedy. A couple of sharp-eyed dealers noted the repetitious similarity of the Porter signatures and protested to the publisher. Delacorte permitted unsold copies of the book to be returned for signing—post—Christmas—by the author.)

Some signed book forgeries are good enough to fool even the experts. Luckily, though, most of them are fairly easily recognizable by anyone familiar with a genuine signature. Here again, it pays to have established a working relationship with a reliable and experienced dealer who has seen a considerable number of genuine signatures and is likely to be able to spot fakes and forgeries.

The growing interest in, and demand for, autograph and manuscript material has given rise to another unscrupulous dodge, to which many amiable authors have unwittingly lent their aid. This takes the form of getting an author to sign a typed extract from one of his works, which is then offered in the trade as a typed “manuscript, signed.” Of course, it is nothing of the kind, since it was not typed by the author and in no way can be considered anything more than an example of the author’s signature. Some authors who have been victimized by this practice now quite rightly refuse to sign any typed extracts, and one hopes that the practice is on the wane.

Human nature being what it is, there will always be fakes and forgeries as long as there are customers for material that can be faked or forged. To understand why some collectors are so gullible as to buy things that even on the surface should sound suspicious, it is necessary to understand the deep urge felt by every collector—including the innocent and the unskilled—to own something unique, something dazzling, that no one else has. One old-time dealer, Samuel Loveman, now dead, played this tendency to the hilt in the last twenty years of his long life, offering all sorts of things that common sense should have told anyone could not possibly be genuine. He was fond of signing famous authors’ names into worthless books, offering them in his catalogs as having come from the famous authors’ own libraries. It once emerged that no fewer than three of his customers had bought Cabell’s Jurgen with Dylan Thomas’ “signature of ownership.” But, despite his ability to make reasonably good copies of genuine signatures, Loveman had a slight palsy, and the handwriting on his spurious products was always a little tremulous, a dead giveaway most of the time. He had acquired, on the death of Hart Crane’s mother, her entire archive of her son’s letters, books, and papers, a lot that included a large supply of Crane’s unused bookplates. Well into the late 1960s Loveman was pasting these into otherwise valueless books, offering them as books from Hart Crane’s library. At least once, to my knowledge, he slipped up and put a bookplate into a book not published until after Crane’s death.

As senility set in, Loveman got more and more careless about signing books, using ball-point pens for signatures of authors who had died before the ball-point pen was invented. His catalogs were an endless source of amusement to those familiar with his wares. To my mind, he reached the peak of his forging career when he offered, for a mere $50, a book on whaling “annotated in pencil by Herman Melville.” I’ve often wondered who bought this treasure.