The Book Forger

In the early Eighties I published a poetry and punk music zine called the incurable. The first two issues were duplicated booklets, and later ones were single double-sided ‘beat sheets.’ In between these, the third consisted of half a dozen A4 side-stapled sheets and featured just two young poets, Davyd Mills and Michael Maguire.

About twenty years later or more, a friend sent me a link to an online auction that had just ended. A copy of the incurable 3, folded in half and a bit scruffy, had sold for over £100. Not because of any discerning collector of my work, since my name was nowhere mentioned in the description, nor was the incurable much known. No: the high bidding was no doubt because there are very keen collectors of any punk zines, few of which survive (the same is true for Sixties underground magazines).

Well, I said to myself, I’ll just pop to the copy shop (to paraphrase ‘Roadrunner’) and get a few more run off. I didn’t, of course, but I am sure it would have been quite possible to, ahem, “discover” some in the attic. And since punk zines were not comprehensively documented at the time, you could even, with sufficient ingenuity and application, invent and recreate some previously unknown titles: throw a few collages onto the page, reconstruct a few gig reviews of likely-sounding far-flung bands. Zines often listed other zines, so you could mention more, and then make them too. And so on. A nice little industry.

The story told in Joseph Hone’s The Book Forger: the true story of a literary crime that fooled the world (Penguin, 2024) is in one sense similar to this sort of wheeze: a distinguished bookseller faked previously unknown private pamphlet editions by famous Victorian poets, and sold them for fat prices. Some years later, in the interwar period, two contrasting characters, a corduroy-clad Communist and a languid man-about-town, became suspicious, investigated these together, and revealed the deception. It is a well-known, notorious episode in bibliographical and bookselling circles.

Hone gives us the background, which originated in the first edition craze (still very much a fad today) and recounts the origins of the scheme, run by Thomas Wise, an alert and audacious chancer. He explains how he began with legitimate and overt “facsimile” editions of well-known rarities and then hit upon his more profitable plot. He would find a relatively obscure piece by a well-known poet (Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne), for example from a fugitive periodical, and then spread the idea that a few copies were also printed for the poet’s private use. These he would then concoct, thus making a ‘newly discovered’ first edition. He went to some pains to perfect the incidental details of the supposed publication, using knowledge of each poet’s life and work, and to get the right paper, type and design. His work convinced eager collectors, but it was not quite precise enough to fool a really forensic examination, as the detecting duo were much later to find.

It is indeed a fascinating story, particularly for book-lovers. Hone alternates scenes from Wise’s career with the interwar investigation, an approach which works quite well. Hone, or his publisher, or both, have been clever in positioning this as a sort of Art Deco mystery in the vogue of Lord Peter Wimsey, who is evoked: they have seen that the Thirties milieu might appear more glamorous than the late-Victorian skullduggery. Hone has used the relatively few direct sources shrewdly and colourfully and quite endears us to his investigators. In fact, I thought that a series of fictional sequels featuring this literary duo might be rather fun.

I don’t think there was quite enough material for the story to comprise a full-length study (other than perhaps a technical bibliographic one) and so there’s a certain amount of imaginative reconstruction of the duo’s meetings and discussions, together with general background on earlier literary forgers, and also a diversion on the interesting but largely irrelevant fact (in this context) that the earnest Communist was in fact spying for British Intelligence.

Also, this being an awkward real-life mystery, not a yarn, there’s a sort of fading-away at the end: things were debated, denied, smoothed over, deferred, managed-away, and then the clouds of war and many more pressing concerns. But the book certainly kept me reading and I enjoyed its Golden Age detective style approach. 

(Mark Valentine)