By public demand (hem hem), here is my latest contribution to that fine magazine Literary Review – a review of a book I greatly enjoyed reading. As ever, I urge you to take out a subscription – LR is far and away the most readable magazine of its kind...
The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime that Fooled the WorldBy Joseph Hone (Chatto & Windus 336pp £18.99)
This book has a great story to tell – the author calls it, without exaggeration, ‘perhaps the most sensational literary scandal of the last hundred years’ – and Joseph Hone tells it brilliantly. Strictly speaking, it was not quite a ‘literary scandal’ but rather a bibliographical one, as it involved the faking of physical books, not of their contents. It was a scandal affecting the most exalted levels of book collecting and the book market, and the man responsible for the faking was one the most revered authorities and collectors of his time, Thomas James Wise.
The story of Wise’s crimes was first told by the two men who uncovered them (though there were more to be discovered later, by Hone himself among others). Booksellers John Carter and Graham Pollard published their findings in 1934 in a book with the deceptively bland title An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets – and it caused an instant sensation, not only shaking the antiquarian book trade and dethroning Wise, but becoming a news story in itself. It was the result of a long process of painstaking detective work, making use of the latest forensic techniques, notably the chemical analysis of paper, to provide clinching evidence. Carter and Pollard’s exposé stuck scrupulously to the facts, and the authors took care to stay out of the courts by never actually stating Wise’s guilt. The evidence they presented was so overwhelming that they didn’t need to.
Hone expertly spins two narrative strands, at first in parallel, then increasingly intertwining, until they finally come together in Pollard’s climactic face-to-face confrontation with the cornered Wise. One narrative strand follows Wise from his early days in the various literary societies that thrived in late Victorian times to his first forays into illicit book-making, and his rise to fame and honours as a giant of the book world – and, ironically, scourge of the forgers. ‘He is the terror of all fraudulent booksellers,’ declared one admirer, ‘and fakes are to him what rats are to a terrier.’ In fact, fakes were to him a lucrative, absorbing and perversely enjoyable sideline.
Wise got the idea for his particular line in forgery from his work with the literary societies, who liked to bring out scholarly limited-edition facsimiles of early and obscure works by their revered authors – Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne and the like. These often became sought-after items, but it was always made clear that they were facsimiles. Wise’s bright idea was to bring out editions of works by these authors bearing earlier dates than the known first editions, and to pass them off as genuine, with carefully concocted stories of provenance to explain why they had never before seen the light of day. Wise already had a formidable reputation as a book hunter and an expert knowledge of book production, so he was sure to be believed. Soon he was doing very well out of the rising commercial value of what were then ‘modern firsts’. But his nefarious activities went beyond this: as Carter and Pollard did not know, Wise was also a thief, tearing out pages from books in the British Museum library to make up ‘perfect’ copies of rare volumes.
But what of Pollard and Carter? They were an odd couple – Carter a suave, debonair product of Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, and Pollard a scruffy, rather louche one-time communist, leading a double life as bookseller and MI5 agent, spying on his former ‘comrades’. An Oxonian, Pollard was a member of the hard-drinking Hypocrites Club and credited as ‘the Jesus man who introduced corduroy trousers to polite society’. It was the book trade, and their passion for book collecting, that brought these two together, and gave them their great project – to expose Wise, who was widely disliked, and regarded by the younger generation of bibliophiles as something of a dinosaur. Hone makes a page-turning narrative of their detective work, technical though it often is, and the reader will be cheering them on, especially as Wise was such an unpleasant character, for all his ability to ingratiate himself with those who could be useful to him – including the very authors whose works he was set on faking.
Why did he do what he did? Hone suggests that he was driven by a burning desire to take his seat at the top table of the book world, despite his obscure background and limited education (he was no Oxbridge man). The obverse of this insecurity was an overweening arrogance that in the end seems to have convinced him he could run rings round everybody and get away with anything. ‘Wise never served his books,’ Hone concludes; ‘they served him’, just as the many people he duped and exploited served him. Wise died a few years after the publication of An Enquiry, his reputation severely damaged. His huge library of beautifully bound books, the so-called Ashley Library, was bequeathed to the British Museum. They still reside in what is now the British Library, where, curiously, access to any and all of them is severely restricted. Having managed to examine some of them, Hone finds that the books ‘look odd’ and somehow wrong, products of a time when paper in suspiciously ‘virginal’ condition and elaborate ‘buttery’ leather bindings were desired. Tastes change. The book trade, though, remains as mad as ever: when Wise’s forgeries turn up today, they can sell for more than they did when they were made.
The story of Wise’s crimes was first told by the two men who uncovered them (though there were more to be discovered later, by Hone himself among others). Booksellers John Carter and Graham Pollard published their findings in 1934 in a book with the deceptively bland title An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets – and it caused an instant sensation, not only shaking the antiquarian book trade and dethroning Wise, but becoming a news story in itself. It was the result of a long process of painstaking detective work, making use of the latest forensic techniques, notably the chemical analysis of paper, to provide clinching evidence. Carter and Pollard’s exposé stuck scrupulously to the facts, and the authors took care to stay out of the courts by never actually stating Wise’s guilt. The evidence they presented was so overwhelming that they didn’t need to.
Hone expertly spins two narrative strands, at first in parallel, then increasingly intertwining, until they finally come together in Pollard’s climactic face-to-face confrontation with the cornered Wise. One narrative strand follows Wise from his early days in the various literary societies that thrived in late Victorian times to his first forays into illicit book-making, and his rise to fame and honours as a giant of the book world – and, ironically, scourge of the forgers. ‘He is the terror of all fraudulent booksellers,’ declared one admirer, ‘and fakes are to him what rats are to a terrier.’ In fact, fakes were to him a lucrative, absorbing and perversely enjoyable sideline.
Wise got the idea for his particular line in forgery from his work with the literary societies, who liked to bring out scholarly limited-edition facsimiles of early and obscure works by their revered authors – Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne and the like. These often became sought-after items, but it was always made clear that they were facsimiles. Wise’s bright idea was to bring out editions of works by these authors bearing earlier dates than the known first editions, and to pass them off as genuine, with carefully concocted stories of provenance to explain why they had never before seen the light of day. Wise already had a formidable reputation as a book hunter and an expert knowledge of book production, so he was sure to be believed. Soon he was doing very well out of the rising commercial value of what were then ‘modern firsts’. But his nefarious activities went beyond this: as Carter and Pollard did not know, Wise was also a thief, tearing out pages from books in the British Museum library to make up ‘perfect’ copies of rare volumes.
But what of Pollard and Carter? They were an odd couple – Carter a suave, debonair product of Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, and Pollard a scruffy, rather louche one-time communist, leading a double life as bookseller and MI5 agent, spying on his former ‘comrades’. An Oxonian, Pollard was a member of the hard-drinking Hypocrites Club and credited as ‘the Jesus man who introduced corduroy trousers to polite society’. It was the book trade, and their passion for book collecting, that brought these two together, and gave them their great project – to expose Wise, who was widely disliked, and regarded by the younger generation of bibliophiles as something of a dinosaur. Hone makes a page-turning narrative of their detective work, technical though it often is, and the reader will be cheering them on, especially as Wise was such an unpleasant character, for all his ability to ingratiate himself with those who could be useful to him – including the very authors whose works he was set on faking.
Why did he do what he did? Hone suggests that he was driven by a burning desire to take his seat at the top table of the book world, despite his obscure background and limited education (he was no Oxbridge man). The obverse of this insecurity was an overweening arrogance that in the end seems to have convinced him he could run rings round everybody and get away with anything. ‘Wise never served his books,’ Hone concludes; ‘they served him’, just as the many people he duped and exploited served him. Wise died a few years after the publication of An Enquiry, his reputation severely damaged. His huge library of beautifully bound books, the so-called Ashley Library, was bequeathed to the British Museum. They still reside in what is now the British Library, where, curiously, access to any and all of them is severely restricted. Having managed to examine some of them, Hone finds that the books ‘look odd’ and somehow wrong, products of a time when paper in suspiciously ‘virginal’ condition and elaborate ‘buttery’ leather bindings were desired. Tastes change. The book trade, though, remains as mad as ever: when Wise’s forgeries turn up today, they can sell for more than they did when they were made.
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