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Top Five Books About Forgery, Best Nonfiction For Beginners
The sea of books dedicated to the topic of forgery is vast. Some of these books are brilliant, others not so much. My list of top five nonfiction books about forgery helps you navigate into some of the most rewarding literature this genre has to offer.
This list was made for people who have not spent much time looking into the subject of forgery. It largely focuses on literary forgery because that is the type of which is most currently most fascinating to me. However, it there are books included here that deal with the field more broadly, covering general aspects of forgery, hoaxes, and other aspects of deceptive practices.
Grafton 2019
Grafton, Anthony, and Ann Blair. Forgers and Critics, New Edition: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. New, Princeton University Press, 2019.
This book, originally published in 1990 and based on a lecture from 1988, helped establish the study of forgery as a distinct field within literary studies. Written by the renowned scholar of Renaissance and early modern Europe, Anthony Grafton, it is a short book (composed of less than 200 pages) that beautifully presents superb information. The new edition, published in 2019, has a foreword written by the marvelous Ann Blair and an afterwards by its original author. This book is affordable and is an excellent place for anyone new to this genre to begin.
Nickell 2009
Nickell, Joe. Real or Fake: Studies in Authentication. University Press of Kentucky, 2009. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jcrdw. Accessed 19 May 2021.
This book was published in 2009 and is a great introductory work into the work of authentication, determining whether an object is real or fake. The book is split into three main parts, (1) documents, (2) photographs, and (3) other artifacts. Each part opens with a general overview chapter followed by chapters that deal with objects that Joe has personally helped with authenticating. Some of the more popular cases he discusses are the Diary of Jack the Ripper and Lincoln’s Lost Gettysburg Address.
Freeman 2014
Freeman, Arthur. Bibliotheca Fictiva, A Collection of Books & Manuscripts Relating to Literary Forgery, 400 BC – AD 2000. Bernard Quaritch, 2014.
Arthur Freeman’s Bibliotheca Fictiva (2014) is a beautifully composed record of the contents of the library him and his wife amassed over the course of about 50 years. The first half is in narrative form and takes you on a trip exploring 2,500 years worth of different forgers, forgeries, and critics from various parts of the Western world. The second half is a catalogue of the 1,676 items that they had in their library in 2014 when the book was published. This book is a bit more expensive but is well worth the read and the continual reference for this genre.
Becker 2018
Becker, Daniel, et al., editors. Faking, Forging, Counterfeiting: Discredited Practices at the Margins of Mimesis. Transcript Verlag, 2018. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1wxr9t. Accessed 19 May 2021.
This book is mainly a collection of 13 essays that address numerous aspects of deception. The work is 260 pages and is open-access, which means you can read it for free right now if you want to, just click the link in the citation above to access it. Henry Keazor’s introduction is ideal for anyone who’s new to the concept and reality of forgery because it discusses the difficulties that arise when labeling items as forgeries. Two of the chapters that I found to be particularly entertaining were Jacqueline Hylkema’s account of the montebank and Manuel Mühlbacher’s entry on Voltaire.
Stephens 2019
Stephens, Walter, et al. Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1800. Illustrated, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
This book is also mainly a collection of 13 essays. However, the scope is more limited due to it focusing solely on European literary forgery between 1450 and 1800. Both Anthony Grafton and Arthur Freeman (two of the authors listed above) have a chapter included in this approximately 270 page book. Arthur’s bit contains a thought-provoking portion about how to define forgery and Grafton’s an informative section on the sources used for deception by the archforger Annius of Viterbo.
Bonus Mentions
Ruthven, K. (2001). Faking Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511483202
Ehrman, Bart. Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. 1st ed., Oxford University Press, 2012.
Martínez, Javier. Fakes and Forgers of Classical Literature. Brill, 2014.
Havens, Earle. Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries: Rare Books and Manuscripts from the Arthur and Janet Freeman Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection. Second, Revised, Sheridan Libraries, 2014.
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Hi. This is very good. thank you . I definitely look at the books of the people you mentioned (like Grafton) on the internet. You wrote in this part of your site:
“It largely focuses on literary forgery”
I have a question. You can say “literary forgery”
What exactly is it? What do you mean by phrase? What does it mean here? I do not mean what is in the dictionary, I mean what it means in this text. thank you.
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Literary forgery is forgery of literature. For example, a letter written to deceive someone is a literary forgery. A book written to deceive is a literary forgery. Any writing meant to deceive can be considered a literary forgery. In contrast, a painting or a statue created to deceive is an art forgery. I hope this helps clarify the term.
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You said “book written for deception is a literary forgery.”
If all one history book is written for deception, it is literary forgery. Now suppose (this is just a hypothesis) that it is true in the Christian Bible and the Bible except for 5% of all cases. And that 5% is the result of forging a group. Is this also a “literary forgery”? That is, if parts of a historical book (not all of it) are considered “literary forgery”? Or because the slightly written part (for example 5%) is not considered “literary forgery”?
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That is a good question. The answer really depends on the specific case.
I have an article @ https://ctruth.today/2021/05/19/establishing-semantics-for-mimesiology-and-illusology/ where I discuss some of the issues with labeling something as a forgery. I also explore different perceptions of forgery and closely related phenomena in that article
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thank you
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You wrote “Grafton 2019”. I found the same book from him for 1990. What is the difference between Forgers and Critics written in 1990 and 2019? If it does not matter, I can easily use the 1990 version.
And another question
you wrote “Both Anthony Grafton and Arthur Freeman (two of the authors listed above) have a chapter included in this approximately 270 page book”
Is this book actually a collection of other people like “Grafton” and “Stephens, Walte” did not write anything?
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I think the difference is that the 2019 edition has a forward by Ann Blair and an afterwards by Grafton.
Walter Stephens co-wrote the introduction and also wrote chapter 8. The book is a collection of authors writing on the topic of literary forgery. You can read the table of contents @ https://books.google.com/books?id=BHl_DwAAQBAJ&printsec=copyright#v=onepage&q&f=false
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thank you.
I liked this post. Namely the post “TOP FIVE BOOKS ABOUT FORGERY, BEST NONFICTION FOR BEGINNERS”
It was really good because it introduced me to different people and books. Did you write something like this “post” on your site again? Your site has a lot of posts I could not read all of them. For this reason, I asked if you could introduce a book or author similar to this post.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Can I name people or books in this regard in the comments section, such as “historical forgery” or “historical lie”?
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I haven’t written other posts like that yet. If you want to see what I’ve been reading, you can check the Ctruth Goodreads account @ https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/104362543-stephen-sorensen
Feel free to name people or books in the comment sections on my website. I’m always looking to add new titles to my collection
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Hi thanks. There is a theme. To what extent do historical revision historians trust historical documents? For example, some historians consider 30% of historical documents to have been forged hundreds of years ago. Some historians consider 95% to be forged. Sometimes the way things work is different. Some people consider any historical book and document to be fake. And I think some people accept the idea that they like and based on what they like, not what is true, they accept parts of history and reject parts. Perhaps a distinction should be made between those who have studied and researched in general and those who write on the basis of what they “love” in the name of history.
For example, someone would say that the United States did not launch a nuclear attack on Hiroshima and that this is a lie of history. This person writes what he “likes” in the name of history
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I don’t know. As you mentioned, there is variation amongst revisionists as to how much they think the written records are fake. Who do you know who says 95% of the records are forged?
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Thank you. There is a person in Iran who knows about 95% of fake documents, for example “https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasser_Pourpirar
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Thanks for sharing
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