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Linda Quirk, "Forgers, Fakers, and Publisher-Pirates" (U Alberta Press, 2025)
01:12:45
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer and today I'm speaking with Linda Cork, author of Forgers, Fakers and Publisher Pirates, published in 2025 by the University of Alberta Press. Published in connection with an exhibition of the same name, Forgers, Fakers and Publisher Pirates introduces the work of notorious and lesser known forgers. It reveals the various ways in which experts and authors have faked their own identities and it explores a number of shady publishing practices. And I'm thrilled to be speaking today with librarian, curator and author Linda Quirk. Linda, welcome to New Books Network.
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A
Thank you very much.
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B
And before we talk about your book, I thought it would be wonderful if you could introduce yourself to listeners. Maybe you can share a little bit about where you grew up, the path your education has taken, and then the work that you're doing now at University of Alberta.
- [01:03]
A
Okay, will do. I grew up in Toronto and some of my childhood was actually spent abroad because my father worked for a world health organization. I ended up doing my undergrad in English at University of Toronto. And then after my undergrad I took many years away from university world of universities to take care of family responsibilities. And then I ended up back to do grad school a couple of decades later. During the intervening years I actually had many different jobs, but for a decade I was actually the office and systems manager at a medium sized law firm, which actually is relevant to the topics we're discussing today. But when I resumed my studies as a mature student, I did a master's degree at University of Toronto's library School and then a PhD in English at Queen's University in Kingston. All of these places are in Canada for your listeners. In case anybody's not quite clear on that. Both of my graduate degrees, both library school and my English degree, focused most of my attention on book history. And to just clarify what that what is all about, what I mean by that is really the history of ideas and it can be in any discipline. Some people think book street tied to literature, but it's really not. There are book historians working in literally every discipline exploring the history of ideas. And that of course has to do with the history of publication and communications in that field. My particular research focuses on the first generation of Canadian women who are able to earn a living as professional authors, including the likes of Pauline Johnson, Lucy Montgomery, and many contemporaries who are somewhat forgotten today, but who really changed the world for Canadian women and even women throughout the British Empire. In some cases, in terms of getting new rights for them, they were really advocates and political activists. Since 2011, I've been a special collections librarian at University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections, with a focus on teaching, research and reference work, public service, digital exhibitions and communications, and mentoring grad student employees from the library school. I'm assuming most of you know what a rare book, a special collections library is, but at a basic level, the concept is it's a combination of a collection of rare books, things that are valuable, old, unique, special, very, very rare, sometimes quite fragile, but also of unpublished materials known in Canada as archives, and in the US often known as manuscript collections. And so we have both in a special collections library. So that's what I do.
- [04:09]
B
Super. Thank you. So we're going to be talking today about forgers, fakers, and publisher pirates. This project is both a book and an exhibition that you. You've curated in the Bruce Peale Special Collections at U of A. I know that projects like this have a really long road to publication and display, and so I was hoping you could talk a bit about the seeds for this exhibition and this book and what some of the driving questions were behind your work on it.
- [04:43]
A
Yes, you're absolutely right. There is a very long route involved. I've been working on this. The exhibition I know opened on September of 2025, and that's when the book was released. And prior to that, I had been working on this project for about three and a half years. Where it comes from is as a teaching librarian, and that really is my favorite part of the job, trying to help people who find themselves from whatever discipline they're in, in need of help investigating the history of ideas in their own field. And they may or may not understand some of the implications of some of the historic pub formats and details that they find in their hands. But as a teaching librarian, I'm always looking for ways to help students and other researchers as well. Many of our researchers are faculty or well outside of the university context as well, to evaluate the information that's before them. And while it occurs to me that librarians are often very good at teaching people how to evaluate various types of content and publishing formats or forums, we rarely seem to talk about uncovering and taking account of deliberately misleading content. And I wondered if this was possibly because we underestimate just how pervasive it actually is and frankly has always been. I was thinking these thoughts and then I think, as we've all probably noticed, the mainstream media and social media today are really leaving us with the impression that scams and misinformation Online represent a relatively new phenomenon, or at least a deeper one. And I knew this to be untrue from my work in rare books and sort of dealing with historic materials. It's really much more accurate to say that old schemes continue to be reinvented for each new technology, and that this occurs century after century after century. It's sort of part of the human condition, frankly. So if we acknowledge that forgery and fakery have always been with us and far more common than we might imagine, what's changed? Well, new technologies in recent decades are upping the ante, improving the. And I'm going to use air quotes here when I say quality of forgeries, because that's a sort of strange thing to say, but forgeries are being better executed than they used to be, but at the same time, we have better tools for detecting them, sort of measuring the authenticity of documents. So the whole game has taken a step up in a way. So both as a teacher and as a professional special collections librarian, it felt to me like it was time to dig deeper into this topic to better educate myself, but also my colleagues locally and beyond and my. And the students that I deal with every day. I was well qualified for this project because I use bibliographic methods, which sounds like the list of, like more excited at the end of. At the end of an essay. But that's not what I mean by bibliographic research methods at all. What I do is I closely study important editions of books as artifacts. I'm able to glean historical data from the material elements, paper, typeface, ink, binding, illustrations, et cetera, et cetera. So this is an undertaking somewhat like an archaeologist examining artifacts or an art historian studying an important painting. And my point here is I'm used to taking account of the very physical elements of books. So this is some. This is work I can do to taking a more sort of forensic approach, digging into whether this is authentic or not. I should add that as this project developed, a great many friends and colleagues contributed, contributed to my research by pointing out stories, giving me bits and pieces of information. This is often how librarians research, certainly in special collections works, where we can't be expert in every collection and every set of materials that we have. We do rely on colleagues who are expert in other areas. And I do want to acknowledge that I had so much help and support from so many different people who helped sort of these ideas develop, but no one more than Professor Nick Wilding of Georgia State University, who has famously uncovered several important forgeries and been a Tremendous source of information, inspiration and guidance. To me personally, rare book library exhibitions often feature very special items and collections. The rarities that don't exist anywhere else, not even in other rare book libraries. But this exhibition is not like that. And this is a really important point. The kinds of examples that we're going to talk about today that are in the book, that are in the exhibition, are not unique to the library where I work. In fact, I really want to make it very clear this is really a key point here. University of Alberta's Bruce Peele Special Collections is typical of a rare book library in a North American university in the 21st century. And it offers a good case to study precisely because it does not have a special collection of forgeries and fakes. This is not an area we set out to collect. It's very typical. And that's the whole point. They're everywhere. That's the end of my answer to that question. Sorry, long winded.
- [10:30]
B
Yeah, no, but that is, that is such a, such a great reminder. I mean, first of all, this stuff has been happening for a really long time. And also in spite of everyone's best efforts to not collect this stuff or not spend a lot of money on this stuff, I'm sure it's still everywhere.
- [10:52]
A
So let's talk about.
- [10:54]
B
There's a few different sections in this book. The first one focuses on forgers, and let's talk about that section. You explain that forgers as people have been driven by a really wide range of motivations. Could you talk about some of the things that have compelled individuals to forgery and give some examples of their work?
- [11:17]
A
Certainly the place I should start is where most of our assumptions land. And that is that forgery is about money. And it is certainly in the mix. I'm going to say it's probably not the biggest category that I observed. Although, you know, my, my sample size is not large enough to draw big conclusions about sort of what percentage forgers are motivated in what way. But I certainly saw other things other than money. But let's, let's start with money. It's a fairly straightforward kind of a motive. I should also explain that it's not a very efficient way to make money. If, if people are thinking this is a get rich quick scheme, it's kind of the opposite to that. It's very labor intensive and it requires a great deal of expertise in many different categories, not only dealing with the content of the work, but how it is presented, what kind of paper, what kind of ink, how would it have aged over time. There's a lot of different factors to consider here, but let's get into a couple of examples. One of the most entertaining in my mind, I like to laugh, and this is a good one, is Vraindani Lucas. He was arrested in 1869. And Lucas was a hard working, prolific forgery. He created more than 27,000 forgeries over a period of about 15 years, mostly letters and documents that engaged with scientific discovery. And a lot of them were apparently written by the likes of Pascal, Galileo and Newton. Now, almost all of Lucas forgeries were purchased by Michel Chaslis, who was a respected mathematician and a leading figure in the scientific community in Paris. Professor Chalzlis may have been taken in by Yuka's rudimentary efforts to antique his forgeries, which he did by using special ink and paper that he stole from libraries in Paris and sometimes aged artificially. And when I say he sold paper from Paris libraries, I should clarify. Most of us will be vaguely familiar with the idea that older books tend to have a blank page or two at the beginning or the end of the book. And so those pagers are the kind things that forgers often do steal and use to create forgers, forgeries because they're of at least an approximate correct age. Professor Chazley's purchased these forgeries and was eager to publish the scientific revelations he gleaned from them. And you may not be surprised to hear it, but there was heated debate about the authenticity of the documents in the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and this happened repeatedly. The reason that the discussion was inconclusive is because scholars then lacked, and this is 1869, when Lucau was arrested. So he was working in the 15 years prior to that. But the scholars at that time, even though they were obviously uneasy and they made arguments about it, they lacked systematic methods for assessing the authenticity of documents. I find Lucas to be one of the funnier examples because as he sort of gained confidence, he began to create forgeries apparently written by some of the most recognizable names in history, including the likes of Galileo, Mary Magdalene, Napoleon. And it's just unfathomable that people fell for these because they were all written in 19th century French on paper like it doesn't even make sense anyway. But sometimes, you know, the credulity of people, we sometimes are tricked. Even, you know, we look at something, we think, I wouldn't be tricked by that, but maybe we would. One of the only women forgery forgers that I came across is Lee Israel. Some of your listeners may be familiar with Lee Israel's work from the movie can youn Ever Forgive me? Melissa McCarthy was actually nominated for an Oscar for her role as the forger in that film. But Lee Israel was arrested in 1992. To give you a little bit of context for her time frame, she turned to theft and forgery when her writing career stalled. So she was a literary biographer and with significant knowledge and was able to outwit book and document dealers for quite some time. Actually, she used vintage paper and era appropriate technologies to create letters that appear to be signed by literary figures such as Dorothy Preher, Noel Coward and Ernest Hemingway. And she sold these found documents to keep a roof over her head. One of the other things she did is she sometimes stole authentic letters from archive or manuscript collections and would add a juicy postscript because a lot of times the historic letters might not be that interesting. Here I am closing a copy of my book for your perusal and by the way, I hope your son is feeling better. But to throw something juicy on as a postscript about somebody's affair with somebody might make that letter a whole lot more valuable. So that's the kind of thing that Lee Israel did. So these are a couple of examples. Both Luka and Lee Israel are examples of forgers who simply need forgeries to sell them. Another sort of method of making money from forgeries isn't necessarily by selling the forgery that's been created, but by creating a forgery that can be used as a decoy that's at least good enough to allow thieves to escape with the originals. So I'll give you a couple examples of that. The famous roaring lion portrait of Winston Churchill by Yusuf Karsh was stolen from the wall in the lounge at the Chateau Laurier Hotel in Ottawa, Canada in 2022. And in its place, the thief hung a rather poorly executed forgery. I'm laughing again. The forgery wasn't the right size and the fram color wasn't even the same as the original, but it was good enough to allow the forger slash thief to get away with the original. The original was then sold at auction in London in the UK and was eventually recovered from a collector in Genoa, Italy and returned to the hotel. When caught, the forger confessed and is now doing time in a prison in Ontario, Canada. Another example of somebody creating forgeries as part of a theft operation is a much more complicated and these are both very contemporary examples just showing you the full breadth that these things happen in all kinds of time periods too. So I've very specifically picked examples that vary over time, but arrested in 2023 and 2024, because this is a people who were arrested as a result of a complex Interpol operation. Nine suspects faced charges relating to the theft of rare works of Russian literature from national and university libraries and historic institutions all across Europe. The rare books were sometimes stolen during a break in, and at other times, the book thieves posed as researchers in order to take photographs and measurements, returning later to steal the original and replace it, at least temporarily, with a sophisticated forgery, or even by leaving a book dummy. And that's a little bit of a technical term I'm throwing in here. Book dummy is just a book that only looks like the original in a superficial way. So it just left them enough time to get out by leaving a book dummy in their study. Carol so these are examples of forgeries as well, that were motivated by profit, but not necessarily the sale of the forgery. So, yes, there are examples, there's lots of them. That's just a few different examples that I've offered of forgery as profit. But the more common type of forgery that I encountered is when forgery is created as an act of resistance or an attempt to change the political or academic narrative. And in all of these cases, the idea is that the forgery creates false evidence to support a different view than the current common one. And this is really a very, very common example. So I have lots of examples I can give you. Again, I'm going to try to cover a little bit of a broader time frame so you see the kind of thing that. That we're talking about here. In the first example, Mikhail de Luna was an interpreter in the court of Philip II of Spain in the late 1500s. And what DeLuna did was he forged an account of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula a century earlier. This account he falsely claimed to have translated into Spanish from an old Arabic chronicle, which was exactly the task he had been set. Now, this history was republished again and again in various places in Spain over century, but this false history contains so many obvious and deliberate errors that it seems to have been created as an act of resistance against the Spanish authorities who commanded him. Some of the errors were not errors that he could have accidentally made anyway. So that is that it really is an act of resistance. In that case, to take on a more scholarly example, I'm going to try to explain this as simply as I can. It's hard to figure out how to come at the story of John Payne Collier, because the thing that I need to sort of explain is that the early publication of Shakespeare's texts, the very nature of publication in the 1600s, early 1600s, was very, very uncertain. There were inconsistencies, things were being changed on the fly. There weren't the same editorial practices. There's so many different layers to what could go wrong. So as you can well imagine, Shakespearean scholars have long sought a really authoritative text. How do we know which text is the closest to the actual real language of Shakespeare? What was Shakespeare actually saying? And I'm sure there's at least some people, some of your listeners, who can relate to my experience where I actually, at University of Toronto, as an undergraduate student in an English class, was subjected to seven one hour lectures on one word, Shakespeare. We were trying to figure out whether which of the two words it could have been. It actually was box level, other stories. But people spend a lot of time on this work. And so John Penn Collier set out in the 1800s to provide an answer, a scholarly answer, to make a name for himself, to really have discovered the very language of Shakespeare there by creating or causing to be created a forgery. We don't actually know if he made it himself, so here's what he did. He or the person or persons working for him handwrote notes in the margins of a real early folio edition of Shakespeare from 1632. So the original 1632 edition is real, but the handwritten notes in it were written in the 1800s in such a way that they were made to look like they were written in the early 1600s using styles, styles of spelling and handwriting that were meant to make it look earlier. And so then Collier argued that the old corrector, and I'm using air quotes here, that's the term he used. The old corrector must have been a contemporary of Shakespeare's, partly because of the things supposedly this old corrector knew. So for Collier, Collier claimed, not falsely, that these corrections finally offered scholars the very, and I'm going to quote you now, the restored language of Shakespeare, which, you know, was kind of the holy Grail for Shakespearean scholars. It's completely false. But there were thousands and thousands of handwritten notes in this forgery that Collier made or caused to make. So this is another kind of example of somebody trying to create evidence where none exists and using a forgery to do it. Third kind of category in the same type of a thing has to do with reimagining the legacy of Oscar Wilde. So Oscar Wilde is remembered today for his extraordinary wit, for his famous novel, the Couture of Doreen Gray and for a series of comic masterpieces including the Importance of Being Earnest. He's also remembered for high profile civil and criminal trials centered on homosexual acts, which were then illegal in Britain. After his death, Wilde was embraced by literary scholars who often celebrated his work while downplaying both his homosexuality and his extravagant lifestyle. In the 1920s, some forgers got busy. These were Wilde's ardent admirers, and a bunch of them worked as a collective to create and market forgeries in the form of personal letters and literary manuscripts. They were made to appear as if they were penned by Wilde and his closest friends and circle. And here's an example, really the forgers themselves imagined their archival labors were noble. Their intentions on some level were noble. They wanted to create a more authentic picture of the author and try to redirect the narrative about his life and work. So they tried to use forgeries to correct what they saw as an error. A very complex story that I've tried to tell you here is these, these sort of examples of people trying to change the narrative by creating false evidence. And this is really a very common category for literary, academic, historic, scientific forgeries that we see people trying to create false evidence using forgeries. One of the more surprising profiles for forgers that I've found, I, I've been vaguely aware of some of the famous forgers who were young men, but I haven't real. Many very young men are quite famous forgers. And I will underscore the point that very few known forgers were women. So when I speak of young men, I'm not failing to be gender inclusive. The point is most forgers have historically been men. And part of the reason for that is that writing and publishing have historically been dominated by men. What surprised me is how many of the famous forgers were very young men displaying an extraordinary range of talents and knowledge, all the more remarkable for their young ages. So Thomas Chatterton, even if you don't know much about literature or forgery, that's one of the names in this exhibition and book that you may already know. Quite famous for creating some medieval forgeries a few hundred years after the medieval period. And he did all this before the age of 17, in fact. And we know this because Thomas Chatterton died quite tragically at the age of 17. The most famous among the Shakespearean forgers was William Henry Ireland, and he was 19 years old when he created the most famous Shakespearean forgeries. In this case, they were actually William Henry Ireland's forgeries were actually published by his father, Samuel Ireland, whose Friends and cronies included some noted chicks, Shakespearean scholars who looked at these forgeries with awe and reverence, believing them to be handwritten by Shakespeare. And they were published by the father, Samuel Ireland, who then, of course, was humiliated when the truth came out. And another example of a young man forger, who some of you again will already be well familiar with, is con man and forger Frank Abagnale, well known from the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Catch Me if you can. And Abagnale became famous before the age of 20. Or infamous is probably the better way to put it. What's interesting is that each of these young men seemed unable to find a way to channel his extraordinary abilities, knowledge, training, academic expertise into something more productive. And they seem to have feel that they've been wronged or underappreciated and maybe even were left something to prove. So when we're talking about motivations, this sort of class of young men, forgers, seem to have a very specific set of motivations that we don't necessarily always see with the more mature forgers. This is a very strange conversation we're having here. But one of the interesting points with all of this, though, and it applies beyond these young men, but with these young men who are seeking to prove something, there's an irony at the heart of their stories. Because to be successful, their talents have to remain forever concealed. They are rather less successful as forgers if it's revealed that they actually were the forgers. And there's a lot of theories out there that forgers, maybe not just the young men, but many of them, ultimately want to be caught so that their achievements can be recognized by others. I don't know if that's true or not. I'm certainly not saying it is. You can't fully step into the minds of these people. But one of the things I will say is that some of the most skillful forgers intentionally leave a kind of a signature in the form of one or two intentional flaws. And these flaws are a practical thing because they allow the forger to quickly distinguish among forgeries or to distinguish among his forgeries from authentic originals. But it also sort of gives those of us who investigate forgeries an opportunity to find errors. And there certainly are a lot of them to be found. I'm giving you a very long winded answer here, but I have one more category and example to give you, and then you'll get a little bit of break from my monologue here, and that is that I've given you some categories of types of motives for forgers. But the truth in real life is that most forgers have complex, multilayered motives. And I'm going to cite just one very standout example of this and sort of explain how it might play out. Although, frankly, I could have given you a dozen examples of this. Who I'm going to speak of as well is another forger who some of your listeners may have heard of. Pardon me. Yeah. And that is Mark Hoffman. Mark Hoffman was arrested in 1986. He is a confessed forger and a convicted murderer who was currently serving a life sentence. Now, Hoffman, as a teenager, started modifying coins to increase their value. So that was strictly profit motive. And as a young man, he moved on to creating fake documents and publications. Profit motive seemed to always be a key part of what Hoffman had in mind. But it becomes clear as his career goes on and we see the kinds of things that he did, that he also had an increasing ambition to get the best of the experts, to really show them what's what. And also by a very strong wish to embarrass the Mormon Church. He grew up more Mormon and was. His family was part of the church. But there seems to be some sense in which he felt like an outsider in some kind of a way, even though they were right in the church. And so what he actually did was he forged documents that absurdly replaced the white angel at the center of the origin story of the Mormon Church with a white salamander. And so for him, as a forger, this meant that either he would sell these embarrassing documents to a collector who would release them and embarrass the church, or he hoped to sell them to the Mormon Church who might suppress them. So it worked either way for him. But as he moved forward. So I'm describing him as being motivated by profit, a wish to get the best of the experts, booksellers, literary experts, historians, et cetera, but also embarrass the Mormon Church. But what ended up happening is he worked very hard at this, and he ended up becoming the most skilled and prolific of American forgers. When the authorities were closing in on him, Hoffman built and deployed several arms, committing murders in an attempt to cover his tracks. Some of you may have seen and others may be interested in seeing. There's a Netflix limited series called Murder among the Mormons, which is sort of a part documentary, part, part dramatization of Hoffman's story, at least part of his story. So that's a whole other economist story, but this, I cite him as an example of how, even though I'm trying to tell you there's lots more motives involved than you might think. We can't simply black and white say this forgery was motivated in this way and that forger was motivated in that way. Most of them are fairly complex individuals.
- [35:16]
B
Thank you so much for this, like, really clear breakdown. I, in reading through the book that that goes with this exhibition, I was like, as you said, you know, I jumped to the assumption of, of profit as a motivation for forgery. And I was just like, really impressed to learn of all the different reasons. And I really appreciate the way you've broken these motivations, these motivations down in this conversation. And I guess, like, that nuance then was something I also noticed in your discussion of the work of fakers. And so reading through that section, I realized that the concept of a faker and the fakes that they make has a lot more nuance than I typically think of when I throw those words around in conversation. For sure. And so can you maybe, maybe share examples again of works by fakers and explain what nuance we need to add to this label and what nuance that label should bring to our conversations about fakers, our understandings of them and their work, or what questions we should think of, what questions we should ask when we're talking about fakers and fakes?
- [36:30]
A
Yes, thank you, I'd be happy to. And one of the things I should note for your listeners, your questions are really very good. Writing the money, really. And I think you're asking the right questions because if we can understand things about the motives and the subtleties, then we can better assess what we're looking at. Right. It's one of the tools we can all use if we can sort of try to imagine what people's motives actually are. And, and in the case of the speaker's question, I'm about to jump into kind of how serious is what they're doing. Some of it we can shrug out, and some of it is quite serious. And these are things worth understanding. So first I should just clarify what I mean by a faker, because I suppose I could mean a number of different things. But what I mean by a faker is an author, a creator, or an expert who misrepresents themselves in some way, most commonly their name, identity in some way, their ethnicity and. Or their credentials. And it's worth noting that fakery ranges from the harmless use of pseudonyms that noob, you know, authors sometimes write under fake names. We're not too fussed by that for the most part. But so we're going to take that at the very extremely harmless end of fakery. There's a little fakery there. It is part of it. They're not always using their real name to extreme fakes. And some of those extreme fakes actually become known as forgeries, even though the point of the forgery is that the person is not the expert that they claim to be. So let's cover some examples here. First of all, Eric Arthur Blair is a name that many of your listeners may not recognize, and yet you'll certainly recognize the name under which he published. He's one of the many respected authors who have published under pseudonym in order to disguise their identity, at least to some extent. It was on the title page of his first book, down and out in Paris and London in 1933 that Blair first became known to the world as George Orwell. And in that case he used a pseudonym because down and out in Paris and London is actually about his real life living as a tramp and living on the street in deep poverty. It's a very sensitive portrayal of poverty. But he was a little bit concerned about embarrassing his family if he published this story under his own name. So that's why he adopted the pseudonym George Orwell. Many of us are also very familiar with the idea that early women writers adopted pseudonyms in a bid to be taken more seriously or even in a bid to get a publisher at all. And so there's all kinds of examples of that. I don't even have to start listing them off. You can all think of them. Jane Austen published as a lady, rather than giving a name at all because she wanted to at least maintain her gender. But the Bronte sisters all published under pseudonyms, and George Eliot is actually the pseudonym of Marianne Evans, et cetera, et cetera. There's lots of examples of that. We're not too fussed by it. It's pretty easy to get to the bottom of things. We're not being tricked or misled particularly, but the next step, sort of if we up the ante just a little bit from a pseudonym to somebody who lives under an alias, who actually doesn't just write under a an assumed name, but actually lives an identity that is other than their own. So a very famous example in Canada. Some of your listeners may or may not be familiar with this name, but Braille is very, very well known in Canada. We hear today in the media about pretendions, which is really a 21st century concept of pretend Indians, Indigenous people who are non Indigenous who pretend to be in order to claim Benefits intended for indigenous peoples, but Archie Belaney's Prior to all that, Archie Belaney grew up in England and read adventure stories set in the wilderness of North America. Immigrating to Canada in 19076 at the age of 17, he learned wilderness skills, worked as a trapper and adopted a false indigenous identity. Became known as Gray Owl. Living under the same leaves for decades, his first wife, an indigenous woman, knew exactly where he came from and what his true identity was, but his later wives did not. So he actually married other indigenous women over his lifetime and he did not disclose his true identity to them. Under the influence of his fourth wife, who was an indigenous conservationist, Bellini eventually gave up trapping and himself became a conservationist working on behalf of the beaver. And the North American beaver was then on the verge of extinction. So Grail, or we could call him by his real name, Archie Villainy, really, to accomplish something as a conservationist. He became quite a famous international speaker and author. So it's not that his credentials as a conservationist are suspect, it's his very identity suspect. So this is an interesting question, is how much does it matter that he was a prototendian in a early sense before that term had been coined. But it's certainly a more serious step from just a pseudonym. I mean, he certainly put on full headdress that performed as an indigenous person in front of crowds in order to get attention to his pioneering conservation work. So maybe there's pros and cons to that story. Another example I'm going to give you is a very strange story. If we were to go with motives, I can't even fathom what this person's motives were. But let me tell you about an unknown Frenchman. We don't actually, he lived and died under his alias. We don't know what his real name ever was, but he used and I'm not going to pronounce this quite right, George is fine. I can pronounce George Salmanazar. I think it sort of looks like Salman Psalm and then almost like Bazaar on the other end of it. Salman Azar. And this unknown Frenchman pretended to be Taiwanese and he bamboozled British scholars at the Royal Academy with his account of the customs, geography and history of Taiwan, even speaking to them in his made up language, even though he had never been to Taiwan and had no knowledge of it, but he, he pretended to have actually grown up in Taiwan. His stories are absurd, racist, nonsensical. When asked why he didn't look very Asian, this, this fellow had blonde hair and blue eyes. He said that the upper classes in Taiwan lived under the ground and weren't exposed to sunlight, so they were pale, like. It was just sort of very strange, the stories that he came up with. But because British academics knew very little about Taiwan in 1704, they were completely taken in and actually encouraged him to publish a book that is now, of course, well known to be a forgery. The book was published in 1704, and it wasn't until 60 years later that this bizarre story hit its conclusion. In 1764, after his death, his confessional memoir was published according to his wishes by his executor, and it was published in his words to undeceive the world by confessing the circumstances that led to the creation of a scandalous piece of forgery. I can't even tell you what this was all about, but I can tell you that there are many other historical examples of people who, for reasons that, like, we can't even fathom what motivated all of this, but somehow maybe just settling out for a little attention, I don't know. But we do not know today what the real name of this person is or why he did it. But very, very strange story, and really important that people do not take this as an early, accurate history and geography, et cetera, of Taiwan, because it's not. The story is about to turn very disturbing when I give you sort of an even weirder and worse example, and I'm going to talk to you about Forest Carter's classic bestseller, the Education of Little Tree, first published in 1977. My understanding is that the Education of Little Tree is almost as well known in the US as Anne of Green Gables is in Canada. Very, very popular for young people to read. It was reissued by University of New Mexico Press in 1990, and University of New Mexico Press marked it on the COVID as a true story and described it in the foreword as an, and I'm quoting here, an inspirational autobiographical remembrance of a young Indian boy. Deeply moving story that informs the heart and educates the spirit. As you can well imagine, I'm about to tell you that it's none of it things. In a recent biography entitled Unmasking the Klansmen, we learned that Alabama Klansman Asa Carter had gone into hiding to elude the authorities in 1972 and reappeared with a new identity as Forrest Carter, a pretend Cherokee novelist living in Texas. Using his fake identity, Carter penned three new major novels, including the Education of Little Tree and the rebel outlaw Josie Wales. Very disturbing. I hope I haven't upset anybody with that story, but it is important to show the sort of extremes that some of these fakers actually go to and how it's beyond that. He didn't get the facts right. There's something worse than that going on here. So I've outlined for you examples of fakery that range from harmless pseudonyms to an alias to misrepresentation that rises to the level of forgery because it offers false expertise. How much these types of fakery matter probably depends on what is at stake for each of us. Sometimes fakery probably doesn't matter very much at all, like pseudonyms, but at other times, there's significant risk that in both our personal and professional research and our understanding of the world is being deeply compromised by what we read and take at faith. Face value.
- [48:01]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for that. That range of examples and highlighting that kind of spectra is really helpful for understanding the huge range of nuance to this thing that. Yeah, when we talk about fake news, fake isn't just one thing.
- [48:20]
A
No, it's absolutely not. And when you think, when you think it through, like, even if we were sort of to give personal examples, maybe a fake review of a pair of sneakers isn't that serious, but maybe fake medical advice in a dire situation really, really is. And in our professional laws, in our research laws, in just our intellectual lives, there's so many variations on whether it matters. Like, not only is it a question of whether the fakery is very serious itself or not, there's also that whole range of is it important to us or not? And context is everything, really. Yeah, there's probably even a couple of sneaker heads out there who said, what do you mean a sneaker review doesn't matter?
- [49:06]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [49:07]
A
No context.
- [49:08]
B
Context really matters. And then I guess moving on to another section, is your focus on publisher pirates. So I was hoping that you could explain for listeners what that term refers to and then again, maybe share some examples that help us understand what that work is.
- [49:29]
A
Sure. Publisher pirates, we usually just refer to them as pirates, but I wanted to clarify that they're not the other kind with the eyepatch and the parrot. Piracy in the context of publishing means that the publisher has stolen content from the author creator, and even potentially from an original publisher, and published it without legal copyright, neither compensating nor consulting with the author creator. And so there's a number of different things going on here. For one thing, it's an act of theft, which, as a reader, maybe it's not the end of the world for me as a reader or a researcher or for any of us to think that the author may not have been properly compensated. Or maybe it is. I guess that's a matter of perspective. But what could be even more serious to us is because these publisher pirates lack a relationship with the original publisher who provided obviously an early edition that they copied in some way, or with the author creator, then they often go ahead and change or abridge the content. And so if we have an unauthorized edition of a book that matters to us, that it matters to us, that we accurately get the words written by Charles Darwin or whoever else we're reading, then a pirate edition might not be ideal, even though they're quite popular with students, because they tend to be cheaper than more mainstream so called authorized editions. And you know, it's an interesting one because in a world where today we tend to value open access to information, we may downplay the importance of the theft. But the issues can be more complicated if the text isn't exactly correct. And so in a way, the publisher pirates, some of them are taking advantage only of the author, which an original publisher, which is bad enough, but they also may be misleading readers. And so there's a lot of different sort of layers to this. It's a very common practice. Prior to new copyright laws in the 1900s, piracy was very, very common. And one of the things that happened as a matter of routine is that a book that was published in the UK could then be a copy purchased in the UK might then be brought to Australia, the United States or Canada and published by a local publisher because it wasn't under any kind of copyright protection in that country. So there's a lot of different geopolitical elements to piracy. But let me give you a more basic, concrete example, and that is an author many of your listeners will have heard of is Anne Radcliffe. She remains today the best known of the early gothic women writers. Very sort of the dark night in the sort of melodramatic romance. Very, very popular for many, many years. She was writing in the late 1700s and penned a series of popular novels that were reissued again and again in both authorized and unauthorized or pirated editions. They were routinely translated into French, German and Italian, again sometimes with arrangements made with the author and original publisher, sometimes not, sometimes piracies. There are also, just to show you sort of a different version of all this, a dizzying array of unauthorized, pirated, anonymously written abridgments. So Reader's Digest versions, if you will, of her novels that were published in cheap schilling shocker magazines. So there's a Lot of different variations. With Ann Radcliffe, there are the authorized editions even today that are we published. There are unauthorized editions, whether in translation or in English and there are shortened versions that were written by God knows who. And you know, sometimes the names of characters were changed to sort of trying distincts from the original, but all kinds of variations on the theme, pardon me here. And these are all just examples of what is very typical if we push piracy further into something that gets known as forgery. The names Harry Bucks and Foreman and Thomas J. Wise come to mind very quickly. Both were scholars and in fact, ironically enough, Thomas Wise was an expert on exposing forgeries. But Forman and Wise partnered to create a huge volume of pirated editions of works by major authors. And these are formative. Wise were in the uk. So these major authors were the likes of Robert Branning, George Eliot and Charles Dickens. They made forgeries, a huge number of them between 1888 and 1898. So over the course of a decade now, most of these pirated editions, not quite all of them, but most are properly classified as forgeries because they were published after the author's death and fraudulently backdated to seem to precede the all important first edition in order to significantly inflate their perceived market and research value. So these forgeries look like little pamphlets. It's hard to fathom, like you know, 16 pages, very small, little, modest publications on inexpensive extensive paper. It's hard to fathom that they sold quite expensively, but they did. They were made to look like they were created for circulation among the author's friends before the actual first edition came out. And so part of what they offered, at least fraudulently offered, was supposedly a glimpse into the evolution of the text. So if somebody like Marianne Evans, known as George Eliot, was creating a work, maybe the work was circulated among her friends first, she got some feedback, changed it a little before the first edition came out. So in a way what these forgeries seem to offer is access to the sort of creative process and the evolution of the text. It does no such thing. They're completely fake. They basically used the text of the first edition and then introduced intentional errors in order to show a fake evolution of sorts. And an interesting little side note, Forman and Wise forgeries were very, very common, but they weren't exposed for a couple of decades after the work was actually created. They were very good, they were very knowledgeable, both were career long academics. So they were really, they knew what they were doing, more or less. But interestingly enough, so their forgeries were not known to be forgeries. And this actually meant that other forgers sometimes copied their work and made their own forgery of the forgery. So, not even kidding you, George Eliot Sagatha is a, is a very particular title. In Brispiel we have a copy of the Forman and Wise forgery. But there are many rare book libraries in Canada and the U.S. that have the American forgery of the forgery. And by the way, Thomas Wise was absolutely outraged by the forgery of his forgery. So there's a lot of very strange stories that, that go on here. But publisher pirates are both very, very common and in some ways less serious than some of the other kinds of misleading work that I've been describing to you here today. But some of those piracies actually do rise to the level of forgeries and become actually profoundly misleading to anybody who's seriously studying these authors. For example, many of the rest of us might not mind too much if a few things are a little bit out. We're getting the gist of it, right? So it really depends on kind of where you're at, how seriously you take this. Part of the reason why I included both publisher pirates and fakers is to show that in some ways that some of the types of forgeries that actually occur quite commonly is by pushing fakery and pushing piracy a little further, you get to a type of forgery.
- [58:49]
B
So I guess one other comment that you made that I wanted to build on a bit is you noted that the attitudes have shifted over time about how we value open access to information. So sometimes, you know, we might not think so much of, of pirated editions that are just giving people more access. You've also remarked on how black and white categorization of true and false doesn't always work, both historically and in the present. So thinking about all of that, how do you think that the study of the history of forgeries and fakes can better equip us for critical analysis of information sources today?
- [59:31]
A
It's a great question and it really gets at the heart of things, doesn't it? I think first of all, one of the things I found interesting, and I trust it's clear, I like to laugh. I have found it interesting observing my own reactions that some of these stories, some of them strike me as funny. Not so, presumably I'm not taking them very seriously, even though they say seem more serious when it's the exact same thing that's been carried out. So one forger or faker in my mind gets away with it and another does the exact same thing and somehow doesn't. So I think context is really everything. And so for each of us, how important these issues are depends on what we're researching, what we're reading, what we're investigating at any given moment. And this changes over time. And so, you know, it's worth noting that some of the stories in my book, in my exhibition, are important. Some of them are very disturbing and many others are just funny or even weird. And, you know, it's partly about what we do in our jobs, in what kind of research we do as students, as scholars. Kinds of things interest us, what kind of things we research for our personal lives as well, kind of how this all plays out for us. So part of what, In a way, I'm ducking your question, like, how can I tell you how to answer this? And, and, and, you know, where do we grab on to? What do we hold on to here? But the point is, it's not all black and white. And in a weird way, all I can really do, that I can think of to do, let's put it that way, to help people, now that I've spent years investigating these matters, is to show people how complicated these matters are and to draw attention to the fact that it's up to each of us to do our own research when it matters and laugh it off when it doesn't. And that each of us are going to have to consider our own context that way. But the lesson of all of this is that whether the materials are historic or modern, primary materials are not always exactly what they purport to be. And really, we can only take proper account of them if we clearly understand their nature. You know, if you're a scientist, it may matter. Especially if you're interested in the history of science, it may matter to you that thousands of documents forged by Rain Deniducat are not real science at all. If you're interested in history, it may matter to you that Miguel de Luna's forged account of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula is not real history at all. If you're a Shakespearean scholar, it may matter that William Henry Allen's forgeries were not penned by Shakespeare. But it's about context, how much it matters. But I will say, in the big picture, it does matter who wrote the words when they were written, and whether they were written to enlighten or deceive us. And that right there are the words we're reading on the page, trying to teach us something or try to undermine us in some way. It matters that we understand that. And when we fail to understand their nature, forgeries, fakeries can have a significant impact on our research results because they undermine our understanding of the world around us. So I do believe as readers and researchers, we have a duty to be attentive, skeptical, and I'm not saying all the time, some of the times I laugh at these things too. And I think that's okay that we sometimes laugh it off. And I also want to just add is that libraries have a duty here too. Libraries have a duty to assist us in our research by seeking authentic copies and by disclosing in catalogs and archival records and in metadata, known forgeries and even modifications that have been made to a point, particular copy or copies. And all of this allows people to have at least a chance of getting at something closer to the truth and avoid fraudulent misrepresentations and all kinds of categories. So we all have a role to play, and libraries certainly do too. This is something that I think a lot about is the whole idea that I discover some new forgeries in my library as part of this research. Well, those catalog records need to be changed now. We know something new and we need the resources to be able to do that. Which isn't always an obvious, you know, it's not always automatic. But as, as library people, it is up to us to do our best to be very clear with people what the it is that we're putting in front of them. And it's not a question that, that forgeries have no role. I'm not saying banish them from the library. That's not the case at all. In fact, there was a very good argument to be made that the only place that forgeries are safe is in a library with accurate cataloging or metadata attached to them. Because when they get shoved in a corner somewhere and generations pass, they can resurface quite innocently as forgery, you know, as, as if they were authentic when they're forgeries again and again. And some forgeries have resurfaced many, many times over. So I guess my key point to all of this is, sure, laugh off some of it, be entertained, but we all need to be more attentive to these matters in our research and in our personal lives as well.
- [65:19]
B
Absolutely. Yeah. I don't know all of your pointers around how to, how to think about this material. It's just so thought provoking. But before we wrap up, I also wanted to give you an opportunity to share about any new projects that you're working on now that you've wrapped up this one. No pressure. And I know the the exhibit is still up for a few more months or a month or two if folks are in the Edmonton area and want to check it out. But I'd also love to just give you space to share if there's any new exhibitions, research projects, anything like that that you're turning to now that this is done, or anything you're working on that builds off of this project further.
- [66:00]
A
Sure, yes. Forgers, Fakers and Publisher Pirates, as you say, is up in Bruce Peel Special Collections as an exhibition until the end of March and then we close for the summer. And then our new exhibition which will open in September, is Science and Engineering of machine Machine books 1472-1800, curated by Mark Andrews, who is a private collector and a real expert exploring machine books in the early modern era. So very interesting illustration techniques and really showing the progression of engineering throughout history. So very, very interest or at least early engineering. So very interesting experience exhibition coming up. Personally, I am presently on a research leave and so I continue to work on projects relating to back to what is really more my forte, the pioneering women's writing in Canada. And for me, the challenge is that women's papers have historically been undervalued and the early editions of their works have historically not necessarily been collected. So the sort of standard methods of research for finding historical material about these women isn't always possible. So I have to find other strategies. And that's really what I'm caught up in the middle of. I use a variety of methods. One of them, it's part of why I use bibliographic methods. So I'm actually using when I can get a hold of an early edition of a book, I can actually learn a lot about the physical elements of that book and the conditions of its publication from the book itself, but also sometimes using literary agents collections. I've certainly used the A.P. watt papers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for one of my women writers in particular, but sometimes Nen's archival collections as well. And so I've got a couple of big projects underway, but I'm not really yet ready to talk about them in a public forum. But this is the kind of work I do and continue to do. Forgeries, in a way, was a sidestep, but it's crucial to my own work and everybody else's, really. That's my takeaway. Anyway, thanks very much for this opportunity. It's been very interesting and you both asked some really good questions.
- [68:33]
B
Well, thank you so much for chatting once again today I've been speaking with Linda Quirk, author of Forgers, Fakers, and publisher Pirates, published in 2025 by the University of Alberta Press. My name is Jen Hoyer, and you're listening to New Books.