Literary Forgeries and the Library

ALLEN T. HAZEN

IDENTIFIABLE forgeries and hoaxes have existed ever since
the earliest days of written communication, and they have
been perpetrated to make money ever since the world as¬
signed monetary value to written (or printed) materials. Yet the
general reader usually thinks of them only occasionally, as when
Mr. Wise's 19th-century rarities were exposed in 1934 or when
the daily papers feature prominently the exposure of a biography
of Howard Hughes or the memoirs of Chief Red Fox. A little less
prominently discussed was the announcement last May that a
successful and widely praised novel in French by a young African
writer, a novel that the author himself declared to be following
the traditional rhythms and the spirit of the African past, con¬
tained sizable extracts translated literally from a novel by Graham
Greene.

Not that the world of scholarship is lily-white. The Bidletin of
the American Association of University Professors recently de¬
scribed a damning incident of an obscure Master's essay in Ameri¬
can history, lifted paragraph by paragraph to produce a sup¬
posedly scholarly article by a historian who was too busy adminis¬
tering to do original research.

In the brief sampling that follows, there is no sharp differentia¬
tion between forgeries and hoaxes, and no attempt to examine the
methodology of detection. Four general types are grouped: (i)
photographic facsimiles, (2) type facsimiles, (3) forged engrav¬
ings in books, and (4) original literary compositions.

(I) Photographic facsiiniles. Bibliographically these are the
least interesting, but they sometimes escape detection because they
look all right if the cataloguer is not alerted. Joe Miller^s Jests,

Abridged from a lecture delivered to tlie Friends of the Smith College Library
in April 1972.