The Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery is the premier library collection in the world that is dedicated entirely to the subject of textual fakery and imposture. The collection totals nearly two thousand rare books and manuscripts and is kept at the Special Collections Department of Johns Hopkins University’s The Sheridan Libraries.
The collection has been built up over more than a half-century by the antiquarian booksellers, collectors, and book historians Arthur and Janet Freeman. The first items were acquired by Johns Hopkins in 2011, and hundreds of additional accessions have enriched the collection ever since.
The Bibliotheca Fictiva collection spans the entire Western tradition from classical and biblical antiquity to the early-to-mid-twentieth centuries and contains both literary forgeries, and credulous defenses or popular demolition of them. Arthur and Janet Freeman collected works in “the entire range of literary forgery, that is to say the forgery of texts, whether historical, religious, philological, or ‘creatively’ artistic, in all languages and countries of the civilized Western world, from c. 400 BC to the end of the twentieth century” and “sought the original publications of such spuria, and their first and ongoing exposures (or obstinate endorsements), in whatever printed editions seemed most significant (along with manuscripts and correspondence when applicable), with a special emphasis […] on evocative annotated and association copies.” Although they “admitted specimens of the more conventional physical forgeries—faked printings, falsified provenance and ‘autograph’ annotation, etc.”, their main interest lay “in the deceptive creation of spurious text and fictive record, and the history of its investigation and discredit, or indeed its survival in present-day controversy.” [1]
From the first ancient Greek “travel liars,” to the faked epistles of pseudo-Aristeas [2] and Phalaris, [3] fabricated “eye-witness” accounts of the Fall of Troy, and invented epigraphic inscriptions from ancient ruins that never existed, onwards to small oceans of extra-biblical pseudepigrapha, classical and biblical antiquity are amply represented in the Bibliotheca Fictiva collection. Medieval “monkish” forgeries extend to faked patristic homilies and pastoral letters, false ecclesiastical decretals, and invented acts of early Christian councils. The collection contains faked polemics against “Pope Joan” (and their early modern demolition by both Catholic and Protestant critics) and the imaginative, if also often imaginary, chronicles of Asser, [4] Geoffrey of Monmouth, [5] and Godfrey of Viterbo. [6]
The renewed rigor of Renaissance classical scholarship and textual criticism was accompanied by equally ambitious efforts to pour new wine into old bottles, from the “archforger” Annius of Viterbo’s “newly discovered” but impossibly ancient world histories, to Carlo Sigonio’s “lost” Ciceronian treatise on death, [7] and Curzio Inghirami’s scarith “time capusules” claiming to reveal the lost lore and prophecies of the last Etruscans. [8] The Baroque and Enlightenment eras proved to be just as fertile for forgery, including devastating demolitions of several of the most enduring ancient forgeries (e.g., the ‘Donatio Constantini,’ ‘Corpus Hermeticum,’ and the Sibylline Books) and imaginative concoctions of others, including an Elizabethan invention of Anglo-Saxon laws as precedents for contemporary trade protectionism, [9] and the runic “facsimile” of the fake Icelandic “Hjalmar” saga. [10]
Literary plagiarism and opportunistic false attributions allowed would-be hack writers to capitalize on the success and fame of actual best-selling authors including, among their many victims, Samuel Butler, Laurence Sterne, and Henry Fielding [11] to name but a precious few. So too must be counted the inventions of William Lauder—the would-be critic who falsely “exposed” Milton’s Paradise Lost as plagiary—Thomas Chatterton’s fatal “Rowley Poet” impostures, and James Macpherson’s incredibly popular, and incredibly fake, verses of the “ancient” Celtic bard “Ossian.” [12]
With the advent of “bibliomania” in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a new brand of pecuniary forgery emerged, purporting to put into the hands of eager, if also impressionable, book collectors literary artifacts that were definitively “too good to be true.” False “autograph” verses purportedly by Martin Luther [13] and Ben Jonson, forged letters alleged to be by Percy Bysshe Shelley, [14] and “inscribed” books from the personal library of Lord Byron were all invented by a host of con artists happy to cash in on a sometimes red-hot trade in antiquarian books and literary “contact relics.” From the sublime to the ridiculous, the Bibliotheca Fictiva also tracks the deceptions of scholar-forgers like John Payne Collier, who mixed convincing fakery with authentic evidence in manuscript and printed forms, and the follies of bibliophiles so eager to bid on impossibly rare books listed in the fake Fortsas auction catalogue that they traveled to attend this well-advertised but nonexistent sale in the tiny provincial Belgian village of Binche. [15]
Latter-day impersonators like “Princess Caraboo” and the Baltimore-born Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola, whose persona as a self-described “African Savage” and descendant of the lost tribes of Israel, occupied their moments in the popular imagination for years. So, too, did the racist “miscegenation pamphlet” hoax that sought (unsuccessfully) to bring down Abraham Lincoln’s antislavery Republican party, [16] and the writings of the preposterous eccentric Charles Otley Groom-Napier, whose invented titles of Prince of Mantua, Montferrat, Ferrera, Nevers, Rethel, and Alençon were nearly as elaborate as his published pseudo-scientific vegetarian cures for dipsomania. Nineteenth-century manuscript fakes, such as Constantine Simonides’s antiqued and “ancient” Greek manuscript on vellum revealing the mysteries of Byzantine painting, [17] and a false thirteenth-century French Crusader charter designed to qualify several French families’ arms for prominent display in Louis Philippe’s Salles des Croisades at Versailles, [18] demonstrate the eternal human desire to discover “lost” works. A fine gathering of medieval illuminations on actual early parchment fragments by the so-called Spanish Forger and his imitators fed the appetites of art collectors eager for more traditional alternatives to latter-day expressionist and surrealist works. False memoirs, such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s My Sister and I [19] and William Mannix’s spurious Memoirs of Viceroy Li Hung Chang, [20] are further standouts among the more colorful early twentieth-century holdings.
A major exhibition of the Bibliotheca Fictiva collection was held in Johns Hopkins's historic George Peabody Library from October 2014 until February 2015. [21] The allied exhibition catalogue was sold out and reprinted in a revised second edition. [22] A complete item-level printed catalogue is available, and a further ‘Continuation’ of which, enumerating all the additions made to the collection post-2014, will be published in 2022–23. [23] A segment of National Public Radio’s Saturday Edition with Scott Simon [24] offers an introduction to the collection, as well as several magazine articles. [25] An international conference convened at JHU also resulted in a volume of essays inspired by the collection being published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. [26] About one hundred of the earliest and rarest books in the Bibliotheca Fictiva have been digitized in early 2022 and made freely available on the Internet Archive, with the support of the Arcadia Fund, with the hope of much more digital access being provided to the full collection in the coming years. [27] All items in the Bibliotheca Fictiva are also accessible through the JHU online catalogue and Hopkins archival finding aids.
A false document is a technique by which an author aims to increase verisimilitude in a work of fiction by inventing and inserting or mentioning documents that appear to be factual. The goal of a false document is to convince an audience that what is being presented is factual.
The Bibliotheca, also known as the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, is a compendium of Greek myths and heroic legends, arranged in three books, generally dated to the first or second century AD.
Autograph collecting is the practice of collecting autographs of famous persons. Some of the most popular categories of autograph subjects are presidents, military soldiers, athletes, movie stars, artists, social and religious leaders, scientists, astronauts, and authors.
John Payne Collier was an English Shakespearean critic and forger.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1639.
Bernard Alexander Christian Quaritch was a German-born British bookseller and collector.
Pseudepigrapha are falsely attributed works, texts whose claimed author is not the true author, or a work whose real author attributed it to a figure of the past.
Sir Henry Spelman was an English antiquary, noted for his detailed collections of medieval records, in particular of church councils.
The Pepys Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge, is the personal library collected by Samuel Pepys which he bequeathed to the college following his death in 1703.
Henry Bradshaw was a British scholar and librarian.
James Ludovic Lindsay, 26th Earl of Crawford and 9th Earl of Balcarres, FRS, FRAS, KT was a British astronomer, politician, ornithologist, bibliophile and philatelist. A member of the Royal Society, Crawford was elected president of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1878. He was a prominent Freemason, having been initiated into Isaac Newton University Lodge at the University of Cambridge in 1866.
Literary forgery is writing, such as a manuscript or a literary work, which is either deliberately misattributed to a historical or invented author, or is a purported memoir or other presumably nonfictional writing deceptively presented as true when, in fact, it presents untrue or imaginary information or content.
The Reverend and Learned Thomas Crofts FRS FSA was a British bibliophile, Anglican priest, Fellow of the Royal Society and European traveller.
Martin Bodmer was a Swiss bibliophile, scholar and collector.
The Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora manuscripts are literary hoaxes purporting to be epic Slavic manuscripts written in Old Czech. They first appeared in the early 19th century.
Constantine Simonides (1820–1867) was a palaeographer and dealer of icons, known as a man of extensive learning, with significant knowledge of manuscripts and miraculous calligraphy. He was one of the most versatile forgers of the nineteenth century.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to forgery:
Consolatio is a lost philosophical work written by Marcus Tullius Cicero in the year 45 BC. The work had been written to soothe his grief after the death of his daughter, Tullia, which had occurred in February of the same year. Not much is known about the work, although it seems to have been inspired by the Greek philosopher Crantor's ancient work De Luctu, and its structure was probably similar to a series of letter correspondences between Servius Sulpicius Rufus and Cicero.
Tobia Nicotra was an Italian forger who produced counterfeit works of artists in various disciplines. In 1937, he was described as "the most proficient forger of autographs". He may have produced as many as 600 forgeries before he was caught.