The Forgers Read Online Free PDF Page B

misleading in that these essentially worthless pieces of paper for which I had paid a good deal of not-worthless money were not destined for the permanent collection. No, the whole lot was a fraud. But it was far and away the finest forgery I had seen in many a year, perhaps ever, inventive in its content, convincing in its execution. I was awestruck and disturbed and compelled to take it off the market lest it come under wider scrutiny.
    A forgery of this high quality is, to my mind, as informed by genius as any of your everyday authentic originals. It’s just that the creativity involved is of an altogether different variety. A page upon which the creator of Sherlock Holmes has written a passage, one in which let’s say a diabolical murder has taken place, one that’s stumped Scotland Yard, one that requires Holmes’s powers of deduction to solve, is at the end of the day a literary artifact, nothing more or less. Its significance has everything to do with language, narrative, and imagination, and nothing to do with the author’s penmanship. We do not worship gods because they dress well. Many writers from Shakespeare on down have had truly atrocious handwriting. A manuscript by W. B. Yeats is not prized because of his hideous, rushed cursive but instead for the poet’s inspired music, his imagery, his vision.
    On the other hand, forgery is a visual art form that usually has little to do with such niceties as music, imagery, vision. It has to do with the nuance of calligraphic art, a refined sense of historical materials, the science of empathy. Had I the right rag paper, and minerals to mix a passable Elizabethan ink, I could reproduce a couple of lines of Shakespeare’s griffonage from, say, Titus Andronicus —
    Give sentence on this execrable wretch,
    That hath been breeder of these dire events. . . .
    â€”that would, under the right circumstances, separate a foolish collector from his wallet. If one has years of experience, knows what he or she is doing, it isn’t all that difficult. The Bard provides the words, the forger his reborn hand. Not, mind you, that I have ever done anything so harebrained as try to pawn off a Shakespeare manuscript. One wants to make money from one’s enterprise, not to make the news. Any of the greatest literary forgers in history’s hall of fame, forgers so great that collectors today buy their works as forgeries for considerable sums—from Thomas Chatterton to William Ireland, George Gordon Byron to Thomas J. Wise—would agree, were they alive and willing to speak the truth.
    All of which is simply to underscore why this cache of documents impressed me so. Here was someone audacious enough to invoke both head and hand, not to mention heart. The more I studied the pages, the more my admiration grew. But although I might have loved to meet the progenitor of this surefooted bit of magic, my resolve to outdo what I encountered here bested any impulse to congratulate him on his handiwork. That didn’t stop me, however, from making very discreet enquiries of my friend Atticus—yes, his parents were shameless Harper Lee devotees and he always stocked a copy or two of To Kill a Mockingbird —as to where he tracked down this luscious trove.
    He demurred, as well he might. Dealers who want to stay in business can’t go around divulging sources to their buyers, especially a buyer such as myself, one who was deemed by Atticus also to be such a good, productive source. Even, from time to time in the past, a veritable cornucopia. I tucked my question away for a rainy day, one on which he might let down his guard. Nor did I bother him with bald questions about provenance or chain of ownership. Surprisingly few books and manuscripts came with documents of provenance, unlike, say, the art world. Despite my own unusual, dark operation and those of a small handful of others, this was truly a gentlemen’s trade, one in which considerable