Conning the booktrade connoisseurs

Literary scandals – like actual scandals – come and go. Who now recalls, or indeed cares less about, the hoo-ha surrounding whether or not the professional huckster James Frey made stuff up in his much celebrated 2004 memoir A Million Little Pieces and then had the audacity to lie about it to Oprah Winfrey? Anyone remember JT LeRoy? Binjamin Wilkomirski?

Authorship debates, accusations of plagiarism, obscenity controversies, way-out wacky and appalling author behaviour, rivalries, forgeries – they all tend to be storms in teeny-tiny, super-fragile, already half-cracked literary teacups that soon subside and slip from the gossip columns and the culture pages to become the subject matter merely of obscure academic conferences and dull, scholarly articles. Ezra Pound famously claimed that poetry is news that stays news. Book news is news that never really was.

Nonetheless, in The Book Forger, the academic Joseph Hone revives an old story about Thomas James Wise, giving it a refreshing new twist. The focus is not so much on Wise’s dastardly wrongdoings but on the two doughty fellows, John Carter and Graham Pollard, who uncovered his literary sins.

Hone claims that this was ‘perhaps the most sensational literary scandal of the last 100 years’, which is maybe overstating it. The book tells of the discovery, in 1934, that Wise, a renowned book collector, had faked and sold some Victorian first editions. Hone also styles Carter and Pollard as ‘Poirots of the library, Holmeses of the book world’, which again is a bit rich. Basically, they did some research and published a short book, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (1934), revealing Wise’s forgeries. The act of literary sleuthing doth not a pair of literary super-sleuths make. But for all the over-egging, this is certainly a tale worth retelling.