By Sarah Latoza Fri, October 9, 2009, 12:01 am PDT

The issue that said they'd found Hitler's diaries. Right after this, they bought the Brooklyn Bridge They say that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." But whoever said that had obviously never been a writer or an artist. Forging a great book is hardly a compliment -- even if the copy itself is really, really good. Perhaps the most notorious forgery in the history was the "lost" Shakespearean play "Vortigern and Rowena." In the late 1790s, British wrtier Samuel Ireland announced his discovery of a large trunkful of previously-unknown papers belonging to William Shakespeare. Many of the documents were so extraordinary, they bordered on the ridiculous: a letter from Queen Elizabeth I ensuring Shakespeare of her favor and Shakespeare's own profession of his Protestantism. The most famous theater producer of the time, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, obtained the rights to have "Vortigern and Rowena" performed. Its opening night was a disaster. The play was so terrible, theater patrons laughed the whole way through, and it closed the same day. At the same time, the renowned Shakespearean scholar Edmund Malone published a book which debunked every document Ireland had produced based on handwriting and spelling analysis. Eventually, Ireland's son, William, confessed to forging all of the Shakespeare papers in an effort to gain prominence for his oblivious father. The two received the fame they had always wanted -- but certainly not in the way either of them imagined. While Ireland was relatively small-time, Thomas J. Wise was one of the 20th century's greatest book collectors. In fact, he was considered England's preeminent bibliographer, and was friends with such great minds as Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad. But in 1934, a pair of young researchers exposed Wise as a fraud. Many of his "first editions" were anything but; he had been selling and collecting worthless copies for years. Wise never served any prison time, but wound up spending the last years of his life in seclusion -- with the company of only his books. These crimes against literature haven't been perpetrated only by the British, though. Several Americans were imprisoned attempting to pass off fake articles of Americana as the real thing. Two different men -- Joseph Cosey during World War I and Charles Weisberg in the 1930s -- tried to sell forgeries of letters written by Walt Whitman, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln, among others. Both were imprisoned, but Cosey got the last laugh. Today, ironically, his forged letters are collector's items in their own right -- though certainly not as valuable as the real thing! More recently, a German magazine got duped when they attempted to publish what they believed to be the authentic diaries of Adolf Hitler. In 1983, a journalist for Stern Magazine claimed to have received Hitler's personal diaries from an anonymous source. Experts (who were permitted to view the documents only briefly) vouched for their veracity, but further review proved that not only were the diaries forgeries, they weren't even very good ones. Eventually, the journalist who "discovered" the diaries was found to have been working with a German forger named Konrad Kujau to produce the forgeries. Both received prison time, but Kujau came out of the incident as something of a celebrity, and made a career out of selling copies of famous paintings. So, whether it was prestige, money, or just the thrill of the con that motivated these forgers, we can't forget that they were all caught eventually -- even in times without forensics or photographic technology. So props are due to the literary detectives who brought these crimes to light -- Thursday Next ain't got nothing on them. Suggested Sites... Forging a Collection - The Frank W. Tober Collection on Literary Forgery - University of Delaware exhibition focusing on forgeries through history, including the Wise books and the Ireland documents. Museum of Hoaxes - Literary Forgeries - learn about "Vortigern and Rowena," the Hitler Diaries, and other examples of literary fakes. Internet Archive: The Ireland Shakespeare Papers - read the "new" versions of "King Lear," "Hamlet," and other Shakespearean papers -- as written by William H. Ireland.

Directory categories: Fraud, Book History, Forensic Document Examination, William Shakespeare, Adolf Hitler

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