Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts Relating to Literary Forgery, 400 BC–AD 2000. By Arthur Freeman

ARTHUR FREEMAN’S BIBLIOTHECA FICTIVA, the catalogue of his collection of books and manuscripts relating to literary forgery, was widely welcomed on its publication in 2014. It provided a clear and extensive guide to the collection that he and his wife Janet Ing Freeman had formed over fifty years, beginning with the Shakespearian scholar-forger John Payne Collier, and then progressing ‘mostly backwards, and sideways’ to an extraordinary range of some 1,676 examples of deceptions and impostures that range from delusion to deceit, from wishful thinking to outright fraud.

Now, ten years later, there is a second edition. It is in very similar format and of similar dimensions, bound in blue rather than red cloth with matching endpapers and dust-jacket, and with the same layout of Preface, Acknowledgements, Over-view, and Handlist. But the book has expanded from 423 to 566 pages, containing some six hundred new entries to the Handlist, and the eighty pages of Overview now has twenty-three pages summarizing these additions. The thirty-seven illustrations of the first edition, one of them coloured, are upgraded to forty-one splendid colour illustrations and three black-and-white.

The original edition marked the acquisition of the collection by the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University, and the new edition celebrates how the collection has grown with the continuing engagement of Freeman, and with the commitment of Earle Havens, the Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center and the Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Johns Hopkins. The familiar narrative of an important and coherent collection passing into institutional hands and then falling into a deep and undisturbed slumber does not apply here. The collection is dynamic, gaps are being filled and opportunities taken.

The original Overview set out the scope and highlights of the collection, which was then catalogued in the Handlist in twelve broadly chronological but alphabetically ordered sections, stretching from ‘Classical Forgeries to the Fall of Rome’ to ‘British and American Forgers after 1900’, with a supplemental summary of general works on literary forgery. Among the separate sections were Mediaeval, Renaissance, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century forgeries, together with European forgers and an extended treatment of the intriguing figure of Collier. The Overview followed the same twelve divisions as the Handlist, with bold type used for those featured in it, and the reader could turn to follow up the reference in the relevant part of the Handlist, though with some of the multiple entries and in extended sections such as that for Collier, a little patience may be required—the index is helpful but inevitably it is essentially of names and not titles. That structure (and the numbering of the 1,676 items in the collection) is entirely unchanged. The new Additions to the Overview are set out using the same twelve sections, and items added to the collection are recorded decimally in the Handlist: hence Antonio de Guevara (creator of The Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, allegedly translated from a manuscript in Greek, a language that Guevara could not read) was also represented by L’Orloge des princes (Paris, 1550), item 241. To this is now added the first English translation, The Dial of Princes (London, 1557), numbered 241.1.

The additions to the collection are fascinating, an ongoing tribute to human gullibility and mendacity. As the merest selection, among Classical texts there is the first Greek–Latin edition of the pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo (Leiden, 1591), reassuringly confirming that Aristotle was a good monotheist at heart. Medieval forgeries include a thirteenth-century transcript of a royal charter ostensibly granted in the mid-twelfth century by Henry II and witnessed by his Chancellor Thomas Becket, but actually created after their deaths, purporting to grant the Benedictine nunnery at Wix, Essex, the right to keep greyhounds and hunt in the King’s forests. There is a particularly rich haul of Renaissance forgeries, with additions to the already impressive holdings of the engagingly inventive Annius of Viterbo, rewriting pre-Christian history for the aggrandisement of his native city. From the seventeenth century there is Juan de Tamayo Salazar’s entirely fictional carmen heroicum on the coming of St James the Great to Spain, allegedly written by a mythical twelfth-century poet; and an anti-Spanish autobiographical sketch delivered by the ghost of the second Earl of Essex (executed 1601) with, as Freeman notes, the unique STC imprint ‘Printed in Paradise’.

Included under the eighteenth century is a new group of materials regarding the convicted forgers the Perreau brothers and their accomplice Margaret Rudd, and extensions to the existing holdings of the indefatigable William Henry Ireland, while to the Collier collection there is added from the Pirie sale Collier’s Five Miracle Plays (London, 1836), one of twenty-five copies. The odious T. J. Wise and his colleague Buxton Forman have never been a major Freeman interest as their spurious pamphlets recreated but did not corrupt or pervert the content of their authors’ works (rather their date of first printing), but a copy of the most famous of all, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Reading’ Sonnets, has been added. And so the progression of additions proceeds, across Europe to Greece and Russia, and on to the end of the twentieth century. It is a garden of delights—or, depending on your point of view, of poisonous plants.

Freeman is an impeccable guide, accomplished and enlightening on a vast range of material, but without losing awareness of the underlying human comedy, with innumerable instances of frustrating gaps in the historical record being fortuitously filled and unfounded theories conveniently confirmed. The value of the collection to research is self-evident, and it is very encouraging that, as transported to Baltimore, it continues to grow and flourish.