The Forgers Read online

  There is a bookseller out there for every bibliophilic obsession known to humankind. You want a seventeenth-century book on microscopy with engraved illustrations on the life cycle of mosquitoes? There is a dealer who can provide you with that. You fancy rare volumes on Antarctic exploration or the history of ancient Egyptians? Not a problem. Perhaps a first edition, first printing of Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver or the 1813 triple-decker of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in contemporary calf? These can be had. With money, patience, and an obsessive hawk eye, there are few books in the world that cannot be taken home to place on a shelf or in a safe. Librarians and collectors, from high rollers to those of more modest means, converged with calendric regularity at the big Armory show and other such fairs around the world. And many of these bibliophiles became business acquaintances if not friends over time.

  Slowly, vaguely, I began to notice that Diehl and I were mostly interested in the same literary autograph materials, such as inscribed books and original holograph manuscripts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I would like to think I wasn’t stalking him, but after walking into this or that bookseller’s booth and hearing more than once that another gentleman had just shown interest in the same item, studying it with great care, I found it impossible not to take heed. Who was this guy with shared tastes and a penchant for admiring at length the penmanship of Churchill and Conan Doyle?

  “You mind my asking what else he looked at?” was a question I found myself posing with increased frequency and not a little hesitation. Some sellers, the more seasoned ones, shrugged off my cheeky question with slight not-unfriendly smiles that read, You know I can’t do that. But others, whether from carelessness or simply an eagerness to flaunt their wares, showed me this Thomas Hardy letter or that Wilkie Collins inscription that Diehl had held in his hands not long before. The more I learned about his tastes, the more I was intrigued by him even as a small wary voice in my head advised me to be careful.

  Now and again I did buy a manuscript, a letter, an inscribed first edition. Not only didn’t I want to be perceived as a stiff—even the most lackadaisical merchant is there to sell, not simply show—but I liked to take home some of the best examples I found by my favorite authors in order to analyze their every nuance under a gooseneck magnifying glass in the solitude of my study. I knew I could always auction them off later or make a private sale, at cost or even a modest loss, and still come out ahead of the game thanks to knowledge gained. Unless run to ground, forgers always come out ahead. Nature of the beast. Although, as in any vocation, those who truly love their work would embrace it with every fiber of their being even if there were nothing but a plug nickel at the rainbow’s end. For me, the pot of gold was in the act itself, even if the act produced but fool’s gold.

  On a Saturday afternoon in April some half-dozen years ago, standing elbow to elbow in the booth of a gregarious London dealer with leonine unkempt hair and disheveled tweed suit, Diehl and I were finally introduced. I had just handed back an inscribed first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, having spent a good deal of time studying the inscription, its date and place, its recipient, and above all the calligraphy and signature, when Diehl materialized like an apparition at my side, softly coughed, and asked the dealer if he might have a look at it too before it went back into the glass display case between Freud’s Die Traumdeutung and a signed copy of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, each in astonishingly fine condition.

  “I’m sure you two must know each other?” said the genial dealer.

  Diehl and I turned and looked at one another.

  “I don’t, I’m afraid,” he said, although I sensed his eyes betrayed a subtle recognition of me. The unmodulated tone of his voice, flat as a folio’s flyleaf, was unreadable. I had always been far better at interpreting inanimate manuscripts than living voices and the looks on people’s faces.

  “Don’t think so,” I said, not quite lying but not exactly telling the truth—a tit-for-tat.

  We shook hands and I offered a platitude about the Darwin, something about how it amazed me that such a rare book could at the same time be so common. There were at least several available at the fair.

  “Money is always a nice incentive,” the dealer said, joining in with his own platitude.

  “Too rich for my blood,” offered Diehl, as he handed the volume back and, after saying it was nice to meet me, left.

  “Collector?” I enquired, feigning naivete, having noticed that this Diehl fellow was rarely if ever to be seen carrying purchases, mummified in clear plastic bags, under his arm.

  “More a scout. He’s sold me some good things over the years, though he surprises me now and again by buying the occasional gem. Not unlike yourself.”

  “Oh,” I said, and turned my head to glance at him as he disappeared down the aisle crowded with fairgoers.

  Of course, neither Diehl nor I were ever, strictly speaking, scouts, other than to scout out nice copies of unsigned firsts that could after a “cooling period” re-enter the market duly autographed or fulsomely inscribed by their respective authors—or else pick up inexpensive, relatively unimportant period books and manuscripts with blank leaves that, extracted, could become canvases for newly created period manuscripts or letters. After that initial encounter, I began to suspect who and what he really was and, as discreetly as I could manage, asked those in my closest coterie of dealers where they happened to acquire this inscribed volume or that autograph letter. It seemed to me that more Conan Doyle documents were surfacing than usual, and because Sherlock Holmes had always been my favorite, my meat and potatoes, my black clay pipe and deerstalker hat if you will, I was keenly attuned to such minutiae. Fair or not, logical or not, I became convinced that Diehl was the primary source for this rising tide of inscribed and holograph Holmes materials. As I started looking into the matter I recalled the sleuth’s housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson, in the Sherlock Holmes movie The Spider Woman, who at one point proclaims, “What can’t be cured must be endured.” For better or worse, I have seen all the celluloid Sherlocks, from Basil Rathbone to Jeremy Brett, and while I far prefer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales to anything caught on film, that line stuck to me like a newly noticed birthmark. And much as I might hate a birthmark, I hated this sentiment. Not only are there myriad ways to avoid enduring the incurable but, other than a malignant tumor or some other terminal illness, I believe there is nothing that cannot be cured. You see, I am fundamentally an optimist.

  I began by questioning the authenticity of what were, to my honed eye, possible fakes. In my own work, any time I made even the most insignificant mistake when forging an inscription, I bit the bullet and either discarded the volume in disgust or single-edge-razored out the flawed leaf and then sold the amputated book to a secondhand shop for a fraction of the money I had originally paid. I never allowed anything out of my windowless, well-lit workshop that wasn’t first-tier quality. Others were less scrupulous. So whenever I discovered a small anomaly, I respectfully and privately brought it to the attention of whatever dealer had it in stock. I was cautious not to make a nuisance of myself and didn’t bother alerting anyone to signatures that were conspicuously bogus—let somebody else point out that William Burroughs, not my era but just for instance, rarely dotted the “i”s in his first name—but near misses, professional work with a telltale Achilles’ heel, were fair game.

  Just before Memorial Day that same spring, knowing of my lifelong interest in all things Sherlockian, my favorite bookseller, Atticus Moore, up in Providence, gave me a ring and told me he had acquired a large group of remarkable letters written by Conan Doyle in May and June 1901 to Greenhough Smith, editor of the Strand Magazine. Seventeen letters in all, they detailed at length progress being made on the manuscript of what would become The Hound of the Baskervilles, which the Strand published later that same year. Though they appeared never to have been mailed for some reason and were apparently unpubli
shed, all the biographical points checked out, according to my friend. Written from Devon, they described in fresh detail precisely how Doyle had gotten the original idea from a journalist acquaintance, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, while vacationing at the Royal Links Hotel on a headland overlooking the North Sea in Norfolk. A draft passage set in Grimpen Mire, based on the real-life bog, Fox Tor Mire, that never made it into the published manuscript was penned on the verso of one letter and then crossed out. In another letter, Conan Doyle describes having privately witnessed a midnight apparition out his mullioned window after having visited Park Hall, the ancient Robinson manor house on which Baskerville Hall probably was based, an apparition he dared not mention to his companions as it too closely resembled the monstrous, mythological hound of his story-in-progress—a monster “best confined to the precincts of memory.” The letter concluded he would retain “an inquisitorial attitude” about the vision, although he fails to mention it further in the subsequent epistles.

  It was as unique and historically interesting a clutch of letters as my dealer friend had ever handled. Given the letters were written by my favorite writer from childhood to this day, a writer of exquisite, enviable cunning and a craftsman of the first order, I knew immediately that they had to be mine no matter the cost. He asked if I would like to run up to Providence to see them and have a late lunch afterward.

  I would and did, grabbing the first train north the very next morning. As I watched the inlets along the Connecticut coast pass by, the sailing boats and osprey nests on their stilts, my mind itself traveled in different directions. Part of me urgently hoped this unposted correspondence was genuine, as I would dearly love to add it to my small “permanent” collection—I incarcerate the word permanent within quotes because I think it is one of the most fraudulent words in the English language, and signifies an incontestable falsehood. Another part, however, suspected the letters and that unpublished manuscript fragment were simply too good to be true—much like the idea of permanence—even though my friend was one of the most respected authorities in the world.

  After looking them over for an hour and haggling out a fair purchase price, by which I mean hefty but not eviscerating, we had an excellent downtown meal at Capriccio, his treat, and I was back in New York that same evening with my newly acquired trove. To say I was excited would be 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. . . .

  —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 scholarly knowledge and pure commerce made a perfect yin-yang fit.

  My next chance came over another meal, this time dinner near our hotel, the Fairmont, in San Francisco, where we were both attending an international book fair. We had each done very well that day—I was at the top of my game about then, with upwards of three dozen writers I could forge with unquestionable mastery—and he was particularly happy about some materials I had sold him before the show.

  “It’s obscene how you continually find such stunning stuff,” he gushed, referring to a small clutch of Jack London letters about his story “When God Laughs”—outside my preferred area of expertise but perfect for his Bay Area clients at the show, one of whom snapped them up for double what Atticus paid me. “Really,” he continued. “You should have been a dealer yourself.”

  “That’s what they always told my father,” I replied.

  “Yes, but your dad was a thoroughbred collector. Everything I ever heard about him was that he always bought and never sold. Even when he upgraded a copy he kept the duplicate.”

  It never failed to make me uneasy when my father—whose memory was still beloved in the trade even by those who never met him—came up. As a collector, he was among the best in his generation. I could only imagine how ashamed he would have been to see his son rightly accused of being a forger, one whose very first attempts at the craft were made while I was still a youth living under his roof, eating his food, studying his library. Though I often missed him, more often I was grateful he had gone the way of all mortals, failing to live long enough to witness the infamy of his own flesh and blood.

  After shaking off this flash of disquiet, I set my fork down and said, “Anyway, I don’t have the stomach for it. All the rivalry? The competition over customers? The chase after inventory and running down unpaid receivables? I’m better off staying an amateur here on the sidelines, watching you big boys duke it out.”

  He thought for a moment. “Don’t be silly. You’d be so good at it.”

  “I’m not being silly, just sane. Bes
ides, I think I’d be terrible. I’m too lazy to work my caboose off like you do, day in and out, not to mention too asocial. Other than buying books and such, I live within my means and that’s good enough for me.”

  “You, lazy? I don’t think so. Anyway, if you ever change your mind, I’d take you on as a partner in a heartbeat. You just give the word.”

  It was flattering, I must admit. Over the years, I had toyed with the idea of going legit—well, not legit legit, but going into the business, able to accentuate my stock with a bit of Pygmalion ingenuity, if I so desired—but a wise and cautious voice inside told me I was already plenty public doing what I did. Hanging out a shingle with my name on it only invited scrutiny and therefore trouble. The less known about me, the better.

  What my friend didn’t know, for instance, was that earlier in the day I had covertly sold to various dealers, each sworn to secrecy and motivated to do so by the promise of future materials, more choice autograph items than any of them could imagine. Bragging rights, to be sure. But bragging wasn’t on my menu of possibilities.

  “By the way, as your unofficial partner, I’d still like to know where you got all that wonderful Baskerville stuff a while ago.”

  “That again. God, you do persist. All right,” he said, taking another drink of his Pinot. “You’ve actually met the man, tall with red hair and the tortoiseshell glasses?” I nodded. “But don’t you dare let on I told you, and if you approach him directly for materials we’ll be partners no more, just so you stand warned.”

  I promised him I wouldn’t, and after dinner picked up the check. We had nightcaps at the hotel bar, mine a double cognac. When he excused himself to head for bed, I indulged in a solo second round, as I figured it wasn’t going to be a good night’s sleep anyway now that I believed I knew for certain Diehl’s secret. Wheeler Diehler, I inwardly smirked, but this bit of sarcasm didn’t improve my spirits. If Adam Diehl was a fellow forger with tastes similar to mine, with imaginative projects but imperfect skills, he would, if dealers began doubting his wares and rejecting them as the fakes they were, bring a cumulus of suspicion on others’ work, mine to be precise.