Books and bidders

by A. S. W. Rosenbach

Among his critics were Horace Walpole and his two poet friends, Mason and Gray. The boy was accused of downright forgery when it was further noted that the poem which Chatterton brought out as the “Battle of Hastings wrote by Turgot the Monk, in the tenth century, and translated by Thomas Rowlie,” was wrongly dated. This bit of carelessness on Chatterton’s part increased the hue and cry of ridicule. The Battle of Hastings, as every English schoolboy knew, did not take place until the eleventh century! And here the poetic Turgot was relating its history one century before it happened. The goading of Walpole and his acolytes finally drove Chatterton to commit suicide when he was only eighteen years of age.

What a loss it was to England!

Walpole, seated in his comfortable library at Strawberry Hill, surrounded by his precious books and his precious ladies, recognized Chatterton’s works as forgeries, but did not recognize his superb genius. A few of the inspired lines of Chatterton’s poems are worth all the famous letters which Walpole so elegantly wrote for a large public, including himself. Although we wade with zest in the delightful mud stream that, with its scandal and veiled allusions, runs so naughtily through Walpole’s correspondence, we can never forgive his treatment of poor Chatterton.

Not quite in the same class as a forgery, a quaint and equally difficult sister art has gradually sprung into existence, called the facsimile page. Not that I mean to imply that the making of such pages is always done with an intent to deceive. There is a concern in London which supplies missing pages on order for any book you may have—a business that is done quite openly. Suppose you own a copy of the first edition of one of Shakespeare’s folios, in which either the title or last leaf is missing. If you don’t happen to be too fastidious and have merely the collector’s love for the complete, without his obsession for the perfect as well, you could take your first folio to this firm and in a short time receive a perfect page made to match the others of your book. Only the connoisseur and you yourself would know the difference.

Owing to the assistance of the camera to-day and the modern processes of engraving, it is not difficult to reproduce the printed word as it first appeared several centuries ago. The snag comes, however, in finding a paper that is exactly contemporaneous with the book itself. This London house happens to have a large and wonderful collection of old papers, taken chiefly from the flyleaves of early volumes. There are many unscrupulous dealers in the world, even in New York, who do not acknowledge to their customers that a book which they offer as genuine is made up in this manner. Any reputable firm would immediately call attention to it. One not quite so particular, with the naïveté of a child, always pleads, when caught, that he was ignorant of the guilty leaf, not being an expert himself. And yet he had ordered the damning page from the London house of facsimiles.

But sometimes it is almost impossible to tell which leaves in a book are facsimile. About seventy-five years ago there was an expert in this line in England by the name of Harris. With the greatest dexterity and cunning, he made leaves for incomplete books, which exactly duplicated the original ones. In those days such work was tedious and had to be accomplished entirely by hand, as it was long before the era of modern photographs. Harris’s work was in constant demand. An amusing story is told among booksellers of an order Harris executed for a celebrated collector whose copy of Caxton’s History of Troy had two leaves missing. Five years later the collector called on Harris. He took this Caxton from his pocket and showed it to him. It was with the greatest difficulty that Harris himself could determine which two leaves were his. In fact, he had to verify them by his records.

If there are great holes or tears in old pages they can be filled in in such a marvelous manner as almost to defy detection. Here again the literary detective enters to discover a clew and solve the mystery. The fellow must have a specialized sense for this sort of thing, just as a born newspaperman has a nose for news. The true literary detective will tell you at a glance if anything is wrong with a printed page. This is a rare faculty, and in the book business amounts almost to genius. Some booksellers are never able to tell, during their entire careers, which are facsimile leaves and which aren’t. Only a few are adept at it.

Another trick is to supply original covers when they are missing from old and precious volumes. Sometimes a copy of an English classic appears in the auction room minus its blue or gray or yellow paper wrappers. In the twinkling of an eye brand-new ones are supplied, aged by the miraculous antiquer, and offered as being in pristine, immaculate state, “very rare in its original paper binding.”

Then, to enhance the illusion, an old signature is added to the cover and perhaps the price, “tuppence,” written in an old hand. It takes Sherlock Holmes himself to detect these impostures.

I know a gentleman in London who is so expert in detecting forgeries that he goes on a scent like a setter after a bird. But the real safeguard for the collector is to buy his books, not from the transient individual who has two or three bargains to offer, but from the man who is known first of all for his reputable dealing. Then collecting is sheer delight.