Book Forgery: History, Practice, and Detection

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The history of the book goes hand-in-hand with the history of forgery. For as long as there have been rare and desirable books, copies and imitations have been manufactured. Over the past four hundred years the rise of successive new printing technologies has enabled the production of increasingly subtle and convincing fakes. These range from damaged books that have been 'sophisticated' with facsimile leaves to entirely fabricated volumes. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, printers across Europe counterfeited editions from the celebrated workshops of Aldus and Elzevir. Pirates in the eighteenth century would imitate the look and feel of prestige bestsellers by fraudulently copying typography, ornaments, and imprints. The antedated 'pre-first' forgeries of Thomas James Wise and Harry Buxton Forman in the nineteenth century established a pattern for printing fake books that would be repeatedly used and adapted over the next hundred years. In the twenty-first century we are entering a new chapter in the story. While librarians and archivists focus on digitising institutional collections, forgers are now transforming digital images back into physical print, fabricating handpress-era books from photopolymer plates based on scans downloaded from the internet. An unforeseen consequence of the digital revolution is that it has provided a wealth of raw material for the forgery of rare books. This project therefore addresses an urgent problem. Because of technological change, it has become vital to understand how the established techniques of bibliography can meet the new challenges of forgery in ways that engage the trade, collectors, librarians, printers, and scholars. As digital technologies continue to augment analogue modes of book production, forgeries have become both easier to produce and more difficult to detect. This project seeks to address the problem in two ways. Firstly, by charting the history of bibliographical deception and detection over the last four hundred years, from the era of Shakespeare to the present day. Secondly, by extrapolating from this historical inquiry a series of robust defences against contemporary and future attempts to counterfeit books. These two aims are inextricably linked because forged books from all periods continue to appear as authentic copies in the modern antiquarian trade, damaging cultural heritage, the commercial sector, and scholarship.The first part of this project will investigate illicit printing in Britain, Europe, and America since the early modern period, charting a new history of the book centred on the use of the printing press to manufacture fakes. A book-length study will combine detailed case studies with an exploration of broad patterns in the history of bibliographical forgery. It will also document how the techniques used to detect forgeries have evolved over the centuries, from tracing broken pieces of type to the chemical analysis of paper and use of new digital spectroscopy and microscopy techniques. The project will investigate the evolution of those techniques and how they might inform the future development of bibliography as an academic discipline. The second part of this project will bring together stakeholders from across the humanities, the book trade, and the libraries sector to consider the immediate problems presented by fakes and collaborate on solutions. This process will include collaboration with Northern Print in Newcastle, who will experiment with various techniques currently being used by forgers and facsimile printers. Drawing equally on the findings of this network and on archival research into the history of book forgery, the project will bring together academics with members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association to develop new industry-wide protocols for the handling of suspected fakes and forgeries. Through these activities, the project's academic findings will be translated for application in the commercial sector.