Lost, Stolen or Shredded

by Rick Gekoski

  The Oath of a Freeman not only marks a seminal moment in American history; it would also (if a copy were found) be the first document printed in North America. It is highly significant historically because it is implicitly a document of revolution. It requires its free men to swear allegiance to God and to the Colony of Massachusetts, but not – striking in his absence – the king. And those, as would implicitly have been understood by all who swore to such an oath, those were fightin’ words.

  If Hofmann could produce an undetectable forgery, there was little question in his mind that he could get at least a million for it. Where to begin? Hofmann was fortunate – wise – in having chosen a document that might be presumed to have a stable text. Though individual printings, especially at this early date and with a tyro printer, always show subtle variations, there would be nothing to compare the 1639 Oath to. So, having been given the text, and a good look at its further printings only ten years after it first appeared, Hofmann had only the usual problems of paper, ink and design, which a sufficiently able forger might well be able to solve. But there was the problem of provenance. Where would Hofmann have found his copy, and where had it been all these years?

  Easier the former than the latter. Hofmann made up a rough-and-ready, provisional forgery of something entitled Oath of a Freeman, which had nothing to do with the original Massachusetts document, and surreptitiously salted it away in a drawer full of obscure nineteenth-century broadsides at Argosy Bookshop in New York. It was a sensible choice of venue: Argosy is renowned for its enormous stock, and inexpensive material (such as Hofmann’s ersatz broadside) would come and go without any of the sales staff being likely to remember either the piece or (even if they did) where it came from. On 23 March 1985, having extracted the broadside from the drawer into which he had just placed it, Hofmann purchased it (plus a few other unremarkable pieces) for $25 and asked for a handwritten receipt in which the title of each piece appeared. He was now the certified owner of a broadside entitled Oath of a Freeman.

  All he had to do now was to introduce the Oath into the rare book world, but the problem was that he hadn’t yet printed the ‘real’ thing. Another two weeks went by before he produced his document, at which point he informed his favourite dealer of the ‘discovery’. The amiable Justin Schiller was an ideal foil: he had no reason to distrust the innocuous Hofmann, was anxious to retain him as a customer, and unlikely to conceive an immediate distrust of the broadside, which was out of field for him. When Hofmann suggested not merely that Schiller and his partner Raymond Wapner sell it on his behalf, but that they receive half the proceeds if it fetched over a million dollars (instead of the usual modest commission), he immediately had the dealers on, and at, his side. (The offer was too generous, and though it might have been construed as naïve, it should have set alarm bells ringing).

  Schiller and Wapner were enormously excited by the discovery and its commercial possibilities, but also fully aware that authentication of the broadside would be a necessary and lengthy process and were anxious to make it transparent. With one proviso: Hofmann was unwilling to be named as the owner of the document. That it had been purchased by a private individual from Argosy Bookshop was acknowledged, and the receipt was offered as evidence, since it did not bear the buyer’s name.

  On 28 March, Wapner rang James Gilreath, a curator at the Library of Congress, which was the obvious buyer and best repository for a document of such importance, to announce that he and Schiller had a copy of the Oath for sale ‘at a price’, which was eventually revealed as $1,500,000. The dealers insisted that all negotiations were to be confidential, and that it was up to the Library to satisfy itself with regard to authenticity. Some six weeks later, after exposing both the paper and ink to the usual rigorous tests, Gilreath announced that his investigators ‘could find no evidence of forgery based on their examination of the material used to make the document’. This position, later misrepresented in the press as an ‘authentication’ of the document, merely confirmed that both ink and paper were consistent with the date of 1631, though no conclusion was drawn as to whether the ink had been on the paper since that date. But the report provided ample justification of Hofmann’s later claim that he was ‘a pretty good forger’.

  Gilreath, shrewdly, was also pursuing another line of inquiry: he had been told, in conversation with Wapner, that the owner was a collector of children’s books who lived in Utah. A few discreet inquiries later, and the name Mark Hofmann was on the table. Further inquiries in Utah revealed Hofmann as ‘an untrustworthy person with suspicious friends’, as well as the discoverer and seller of a considerable number of previously unknown Mormon documents.

  Add to this disquieting provenance further doubts about title, and a great resistance to the price, and it was clear there was no deal, and on 5 June the Library of Congress withdrew its interest in purchasing the Oath. But Hofmann, with the curious innocence of the wicked, had rather assumed that the deal would go through, and begun to spend the proceeds. He bought a new house, and added to his burgeoning book collection. He was able, though – being a convincing fellow – to talk the First International Bank of Salt Lake City into advancing him $185,000 as a loan against the alleged sale of the Oath, though the document had already been returned to Schiller and Wapner and was now on offer to the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, a likely customer in view of the Oath’s origin.

  Early in September there was both good and bad news from the American Antiquarian Society. Like the Library of Congress, they could not offer proof that the document was a fake, and unlike the Library they were prepared to make an offer for it, subject to reasonable conditions. But that offer was only for $250,000, which, even if it was that little bit negotiable, was hardly likely to stretch to a million. On 11 September – that fateful day – the document was returned to New York, and Hofmann was informed that there was no buyer in the foreseeable future.

  His response to this was remarkable, audacious and not as stupid as first appears. He forged another copy. He did not, of course, disclose this to his partners in New York. Instead, he found new partners (including his brother-in-law) in Salt Lake City. The receipt from Argosy could double as authentication for the second copy, and he could be frank about the fact that it had been on the market for over a million dollars. So long as neither of his partners knew about the other, it might just be possible to market two copies at the same time, under the pretence either that they were the same copy, or (his later version) that he had purchased a second copy from Argosy.

  It was rather a fun plan, but it never came to fruition, because the money ran out. Aside from forging his Oath, Hofmann had also been running what were in effect Ponzi schemes with rare books and manuscripts, soliciting investments which he then paid off with further money from new investors. It worked for a while, but now his creditors were closing in, and high-pitched salesmanship was no longer able to deter them.

  It was time for Plan B: initiate some spectacular and eyecatching activity that might, for a time, divert attention from Hofmann and his collapsing home industry. It was time for murder. Why this would help is not clear. Perhaps it would simply take up a lot of police time, or maybe it would focus his creditors’ minds on other things? But Hofmann convinced himself that anything was better than the humiliation of exposure, and was easily able to rationalise the forthcoming homicides. After all, he reasoned, ‘my victims might die that day in a car accident or from a heart attack anyway.’

  A month after he forged the second Oath, on 15 October 1985, Hofmann manufactured two pipe bombs, with which he murdered Steve Christensen and Kathleen Sheets. He had connections with both victims, but no particular animosity towards either: Christensen was a collector of documents and manuscripts, and the son of a prominent local businessman who had previously employed Kathleen Sheets. A day later, attempting to transport yet another bomb, it blew up and Hofmann was critically injured. Police attention, as you may imagine, immediately focused on him
.

  By now it was clear that Hofmann was not a mere bibliographic felon but a full-blown psychopath. The murders were the result of Hofmann’s financial crisis, and he later claimed that if a sale to the American Antiquarian Society of Massachusetts had realised a million dollars, he would not have killed his victims. Mark Hofmann pleaded guilty to his various crimes – he was initially charged with twenty-eight felonies – so his case never went to trial. He was convicted of the two murders, the forgery of a Mormon letter and the fraudulent sale of a fictional collection of manuscripts, but he was never charged with having forged the Oath of a Freeman. The copy offered through Justin Schiller never sold; the second one defrauded two Utah businessmen of $150,000. But there was no sense charging Hofmann with this crime when the sentences for the two murders would be much more severe. So we have the nice irony that the greatest forger of our time, eventually caught red-handed, was never punished for the most famous of his forgeries. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and a parole board later confirmed that he should never be released.

  Forgery is a recurring problem in the history of the rare book trade, for writers are amongst the very few professionals who can create an income with a stroke of the pen. Artists do this, of course, when they produce a drawing, as writers do when they write a book. But it is also a process that works spontaneously and casually, as Picasso might make a doodle on a napkin in a restaurant, or Hemingway might add a signature to a first edition. Hey presto: instant value! The wily George Bernard Shaw, recognising the value of his autograph in his years of fame, made sure to pay his local bills by cheque, knowing that many of the local tradesmen preferred his signature on a piece of paper to the few pounds that its encashment would bring.

  In my years in the rare book trade I have encountered and rejected dozens of examples of forged signatures, inscriptions and documents. Yet as sceptical and discriminating as one’s eye becomes – and the eyes of those whom one can consult when in doubt – there must have been other phoney inscriptions and signatures that have evaded my (our) attention. Last year a man from the south coast of England was arrested for multiple forgeries of signatures (purportedly by Hemingway, T. S. Eliot and others) in first edition books. Most of them were competent if a little amateurish, and dealers soon began to pick them out. But less knowledgeable buyers were fooled, in local auctions, on eBay and on the rare book sites, and a lot of fraudulent material was disseminated.

  Aside from the handwriting, there are a number of possible indicators when you suspect a book inscription is a forgery. If the inscription is by a major writer, it is of value in itself, regardless of the value of the book in which it is written. So you have to look carefully at which book it is in. If you are going to forge, say, an Ian Fleming signature, it would be stupid to buy a fine first edition of Casino Royale in a dust wrapper (£25,000) to add a small percentage to its value with an inscription. The rule is, buy a cheaper book – a later book by Fleming without its dust wrapper – and add a signature to that, thus transforming a £50 book into a £1,500 one. If your Fleming signature is good enough, and there have been some pretty good fakes on the market, it must feel like free money, and the temptation to do more will be irresistible.

  But this leads, does it not, to a set of philosophical problems regarding the nature of identity? The teenage Mark Hofmann, delightedly recognising that his altered collectable dimes were fooling even the experts, concluded that there was therefore no problem. If it looked exactly the same, if it was under the most severe testing indistinguishable from the real thing, then it was the real thing. There was no difference save that of his own intervention: the difference now lay in the object’s history and not its discernible nature.

  Hofmann was, of course, kidding himself as well as others, and it turns out that his counterfeit dimes could in fact be identified and exposed. But what if they could not? What happens when you can produce a copy or facsimile of something that is genuinely indistinguishable from its original? Given the sophistication of modern techniques of reproduction, surely we can now produce copies of works of art – as well as dimes – that will pass even the most stringent test of authenticity?

  How damaging this is depends on your cultural perspective. The Chinese, for instance, are said to treat copying as a form of homage to an original, and are apparently unworried by whether the ensuing object is by an original master or one of his admiring followers. In the Western tradition, too, major artists have often had workshops which employed skilled artisans, sometimes artists in their own right, to work on areas of a large painting, while happily later offering the picture as their own work. Art historians, knowing this, are still content to ascribe a painting to, say, Peter Paul Rubens, in the full knowledge that what counts as ‘a Rubens’ was often produced by multiple painters, of which he was occasionally the least active. Sometimes he only did the hands or faces.

  What is it that we are excited by when we encounter a work of art? It cannot be simply ‘the thing in itself’ unless we are prepared either to accept that a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa is just as satisfactory as the real thing, or alternatively that the notion of the artistic object has to include as part of its definition its own history? The real Mona Lisa is preferable to a perfect copy because it was painted by Leonardo, and the fact that it is, is part of our response to it. In this sense, then, provenance is an essential aspect of the aesthetic experience, not something added to it. Take that away, and what looks as if it were the same thing feels pale and diminished.

  The curious implication of this is that, in order to frame an ‘aesthetic’ response to a work of art, we need to know whether it is genuine or not. If I put before you – allow me this hypothetical – not one but two Mona Lisas which are identical (except that only one of them is by Leonardo), you would rightly admire them, on close examination, equally. Once it was revealed that picture ‘A’ was a copy and ‘B’ was the original, you would have no aesthetic reason to prefer the one to the other. But you would, and rightly, though it would be hard to defend this decision if the pictures were, as it were, shuffled, and you no longer knew which was which.

  ‘I love the one that is by Leonardo,’ you would say, ‘whichever it is. And I admire the copy, but it is an inferior thing. Not by virtue of its appearance, but of its history.’

  It’s an unsettling conclusion, but I see no way to avoid it.

  6

  Auto da Fé: The Burning of the Memoirs of Lord Byron

  In the autumn of 2003 I was asked by the Tate Gallery Archive to appraise some material they had been offered for sale, consisting largely of sketchbooks by the painter John Piper, which were housed at John Murray Publishers on Albemarle Street in central London. I accepted as a matter of course, though without much hope that I would enjoy it, as I find most of Piper’s evocations of churches, ruins and landscapes watery and romanticised, redolent of the most boring and sentimental ‘Englishness’. Piper may be regarded as an antidote to Sutherland – not much thorny obfuscation in his natural world – but that is hardly enough to recommend him. I prefer Sutherland, who at least provides images that demand close attention, and are worth arguing with.

  I had never visited Murray’s Albemarle Street premises, which are amongst the oldest, most famous – indeed, most celebrated – of all English publishing houses. The present John Murray and his capable and charming wife, Virginia, were the seventh generation of Murrays to run the company, which was founded in 1768, and which continued to operate from Albemarle Street for nearly two centuries. Though it is often said that the building was purchased with the proceeds from Childe Harold, in fact Murray put up his three most valuable copyrights as a guarantee: Mrs Rundell’s cookery book, Scott’s Marmion and the Quarterly Review. For several generations John Murray published many, you might even argue most, of the greatest writers and thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Thomas Malthus, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Herman Melville. The list goes on
and on.

  Before I was shown down to the basement, where the Piper sketchbooks resided, there was ample time – it seemed as if there was always ample time with the Murrays, nothing was rushed, nor were cordialities compressed and perfunctory – for a chat. This was more than a result of impeccable manners, though it was certainly an example of them; rather, it was an exposure to a house style that had pertained, in this very house, for many generations of distinctly gentlemanly publishing. Mr and Mrs Murray showed me into the front room on the first floor, which overlooks Albemarle Street, a pleasingly proportioned if unexceptional Georgian drawing room of a genteel rather than grand sort, with a fireplace on the left hand wall. It was a warm summer’s day, and no fire blazed comfortingly in the hearth, though it was easy enough – it was virtually obligatory – to imagine Jane Austen or Charles Darwin warming themselves in front of it on a chilly winter’s afternoon. But this fireplace – if a fireplace could be called ‘notorious’, this would merit the appellation – was not the cosy hearth which the usual stereotypes demand.

  ‘You know, of course, what happened here,’ said Mr Murray, without the slightest question at the end of the sentence.

  The late Jock Murray standing in front of the fireplace in which Lord Byron’s Memoirs were burnt.

  I did. On 17 May 1824 the manuscript of two volumes of Lord Byron’s Memoirs were burned in this very fireplace. And I felt impelled, looking into that inoffensive fire grate, to make some leap of imagination, to see the flames, the paper warming, beginning to singe, then to burn, and eventually to give off the light of active conflagration. To try to reconstruct with what mixture of emotions the men round the fireplace would have gazed upon those dwindling pages, as their decision to consign the manuscript to oblivion became irreversible.