Books and bidders

by A. S. W. Rosenbach

LETTER OF KEATS TO FANNY BRAWNE

IV

SOME LITERARY FORGERIES

“I cast my bread upon the waters, and it came back to me after many days!”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked the tall white-haired man who sat opposite me in his luxurious library. The room was an enormous one, and thousands of fine books lined the walls from floor to ceiling. My friend seemed in a confidential mood, and I expected to hear something startling. This Gothic room, with its early Spanish religious sculptures, had the very atmosphere of a confessional. My companion had had a somewhat weird career, and as I watched him through the heavy smoke of our cigars I recalled many strange stories of his youth. Once he had been a lawyer’s clerk, but now he was a director in many banks, with financial interests all over the world. The variegated stages by which he had risen to such eminence, not only in business but as a collector of pictures and books, were not always clear to the friends of his later years.

He told me that he had been so poor as a boy he had often known hunger; that, as a scrivener in the lawyer’s office, he had eked out a most pitiable existence copying deeds and other legal documents. In 1885 he happened to read in the newspapers of famous auction sales of autographs in London, and of the first arrival in this country of representatives of the English book houses. For instance, Bernard Quaritch was holding his first exhibition in New York at the Hotel Astor. General Brayton Ives, Robert Hoe, and other great collectors of the glaring ‘80’s were beginning to form their libraries. My friend was fascinated, and as he had no capital to invest in great rarities himself, he thought he would make a few. He determined to try his hand at imitation.

Just about that period there was an awakened interest in the ill-fated Major André, who had suffered death as a British informer. In his grimy boarding house on Grand Street my friend practiced imitating André’s handwriting. He finally manufactured a splendid letter in which Major André wrote to General Washington requesting that he be shot as a soldier and not hanged as a spy. As he described his youthful fabrication his mouth lighted with a smile of pleasure, and he confessed that he had been very proud of this forgery; it had been a work of art! He finally actually sold this pseudo-André letter for $650! Those were the days when unpedigreed rarities were more easily disposed of, as there were not so many autograph sharks around as there are to-day.

Thirty years elapsed. My friend had grown in riches and in reputation. Now he was a noted collector; forgotten were the peccadillos of his youth. In 1915, during the Great War, he noticed the advertisement of a sale in London containing an André letter. He cabled an unlimited bid, as was now his custom. The letter was bought for him for £280. A few weeks later, upon opening the package which he received from the custom house, the inclosed autograph letter looked familiar to him. A closer scrutiny revealed the fact that he had bought back, at three times what he had received for it, his own fabrication!

Several years ago I had the remarkable good fortune to secure for my own library a letter written by Cervantes. It is the only one known in a private collection to-day. Other letters of his—and they are few—may be seen only in the Spanish National Library at Madrid. Cervantes’s autographs are so rare that the British Museum possesses no example of the handwriting of the author of Don Quixote, nor is there one in the library of the Hispanic Society in New York City, founded by that great collector, Mr. Archer M. Huntington. From this you may realize to some extent the desirability and scarcity of a letter of Cervantes. Written on two pages, and dated February 4, 1593, it is extremely legible, in a bold Castilian hand, and contains his signature in full: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, with a fanciful twirling flourish becoming to a great Spanish author. Many an expert eye has passed upon it gloatingly in years gone by, for it has been in the celebrated collections, first of Benjamin Fillon, in Paris, and later of Alfred Morrison, of London.