2 Famous Forgers

most notorious literary scandal of the twentieth century!

This entry addresses forgery which devalued books and involved thefts from libraries.

Thomas James Wise (1859–1937) and Henry Buxton Forman (1842-1917), respected British bibliographers and bibliophiles,¹ forged first editions of Georgian and Victorian authors.² They sold these to collectors, notably John Henry Wrenn who sold his collection to the University of Texas in 1918 for $225,000.³

"It was almost as if the Bank of England had been caught issuing counterfeit money.”

In 1934 Wise was revealed to have been in a conspiracy with Forman.⁴After an extensive investigation, John W. Carter and Henry Graham Pollard published their book, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, claiming that dozens of these "discoveries" of Wise were in fact counterfeits. Further examination and tests (paper and typography) supported the theory that Wise created at least 100 forgeries of works by famous nineteenth century poets along with his partner, Harry Buxton Forman, and sold them for great sums of money.

Forty-seven first editions of well known nineteenth-century writers including John Ruskin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Morris and Alfred Tennyson were declared to be either spurious or suspect; and, even more shockingly, the principal bibliographer and collector of these authors, Thomas J. Wise, was shown to have been deeply involved over a period of some forty years in the establishment and distribution, if not the actual manufacture, of the fakes.⁵

Wise ingeniously created spurious editions. From roughly 1880 to 1900, Wise scoured literary journals for the first appearance in print of a poem, essay, or story by a collectible author. Then he would reproduce the work in pamphlet form, give it an even earlier imprint date, and voilà, a new and previously unrecorded first edition. ⁶

Wise also stole leaves from books in the collection of the British Museum.⁷ He began the thefts in the 1890s to replace leaves missing from books in his own collection. Then, when he began to supply John Henry Wrenn, the American collector, with plays from the Jacobean and Caroline periods and from the Commonwealth Interregnum, he took more leaves to complete the copies supplied to Wrenn. Most of the leaves stolen from museum copies which Wrenn received were acquired by him between August 1901 and July 1903.

Matching Worm Holes & Stains & Paper Wrinkles

Tests which proved conclusive in determining which leaves were stolen from the British Museum's books were applied to the matching of worm-holes, 52 stain patterns, and paper flaws such as wrinkles in the paper which could be looked for in adjacent leaves.

Unsung Heroine: Fannie Ratchford, Rare Book Librarian at the University of Texas

During the late 1950s, Fannie Ratchford, Rare Book Librarian at the University of Texas which housed the donated library of John Henry Wrenn, took most of the suspected copies in the Wrenn library to England, where she was able to help the British Museum check copies to see how many stolen leaves were to be found. A total of sixty were found in the Wrenn copies, and it was suspected that another fifteen leaves which were untraceable at the time may have been in other Wrenn copies not examined in England. It was also noticed that Wise had removed about seventy-nine leaves from copies which later were sent to Wrenn, and had replaced these leaves with inferior ones from his own copies.

Ironically, the Wise forgeries are a focus of collections and literary interest.⁸ The bulk of Wise’s personal papers are held at the Harry Ransom Center of The University of Texas at Austin. Another collection is at the Firestone Library at the Princeton University Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

1. Wise wrote many authoritative bibliographies of nineteenth century poets, including Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne. Forman was a Victorian-era bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller whose literary reputation is based on his bibliographies of Percy Shelley and John Keats.

2. Collins, John F. R. (1992). The Two Forgers: a biography of Harry Buxton Forman & Thomas James Wise. New Castle, Delaware, U.S.A: Oak Knoll Books.

3. The Wrenn Collection was the foundational collection of the Harry Ransom  Center at the University of Texas-Austin. Page, Elizabeth (2018) “University’s foundational rare book collection acquired a century ago.” Ransom Center Magazine; Wise, Thomas James, Fannie E. Ratchford, and John Henry Wrenn. 1944. Letters of Thomas J. Wise to John Henry Wrenn. N.Y.: Knopf; Wrenn, Harold B., Thomas J. Wise, and John Henry Wrenn. 1920. A Catalogue of the Library of the Late John Henry Wrenn. Austin: Univ. of Texas. Todd, William B., John Carter, and Graham Pollard. 1959. Thomas J. Wise, centenary studies. Austin: University of Texas Press.

4. Carter, John; Pollard, Graham (1934), An enquiry into the nature of certain nineteenth century pamphlets, London New York: Constable & Co., C. Scribner's Sons

5. Gearty, Thomas J., Jr. "Thomas J. Wise: A Brief Survey of his Literary Forgeries." The Courier 11.1 (1973): 51-64.

6. Haley, William. “Rare Books: Collecting Forgeries.” CW: Collectors Weekly (December 10, 2010).

7. Foxon, D.F. “Thomas J. Wise and the Pre-Restoration Drama: A Study in Theft and Sophistication,” London: The Bibliographical Society, 1959.

8. Przybys, John (2017) Las Vegas philanthropist collects rare forged books. Las Vegas Review-Journal (October 1); University of Chicago Library. Wise Forgeries.