Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection

dedicated to textual fakery and imposture.

Bibliotheca Fictiva: The Arthur & Janet Freeman Collection of Literary & Historical Forgery. 2014. Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries : Rare Books and Manuscripts from the Arthur and Janet Freeman Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection. Edited by Earle Havens. Baltimore, Maryland: Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection

The Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery comprises two thousand rare books and manuscripts and is kept at the Special Collections Department of Johns Hopkins University’s The Sheridan Libraries.¹

It includes:

“the entire range of literary forgery, that is to say the forgery of texts, whether historical, religious, philological, or ‘creatively’ artistic, in all languages and countries of the civilized Western world, from c. 400 BC to the end of the twentieth century” and “sought the original publications of such spuria, and their first and ongoing exposures (or obstinate endorsements), in whatever printed editions seemed most significant (along with manuscripts and correspondence when applicable), with a special emphasis […] on evocative annotated and association copies.”

From the first ancient Greek “travel liars,” to the faked epistles of pseudo-Aristeas and Phalaris, fabricated “eye-witness” accounts of the Fall of Troy, and invented epigraphic inscriptions from ancient ruins that never existed, onwards to small oceans of extra-biblical pseudepigrapha—classical and biblical antiquity are amply represented in the Bibliotheca Fictiva.²

Jesus Started A Chain Letter — And Other Hoaxes

Jesus' "letter from heaven" preyed on people who needed to believe it was real. story of the letter, about 55 years after Jesus ascended into heaven—The angel. Gabriel took a note, all the way down to Earth and put it under a rock. The rock read, "He that picketh up this rock shall be blessed." The forgery on display, supposedly a copy of the original letter, is also one of the first chain letters in history. "It says, 'He that copieth this letter shall be blessed of me. He that does not shall be cursed.' "³

Forgery and Fakery by Era at the The Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection

• (Classical and Judeo-Christian Forgery to the Fall of Rome;

• Medieval Forgery, Religious and Secular;

• Renaissance Forgery, to 1600;

• Seventeenth-Century Forgery;

• Eighteenth-Century British Forgery;

• Nineteenth-Century British and American Forgery;

• France After 1700;

• German, Austrian, and Dutch Forgery;

• Italy and Spain;

• Central Europe, Russia, and Greece; and

• The Twentieth Century).

Exhibit catalog, Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries 2014.⁴

Digital Copies at the Internet Archive

You can explore many of the forgeries and fakes at the Internet Archive:

Bibliotheca Fictiva : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive

1. Freeman, Arthur. 2024. Bibliotheca Fictiva : A Collection of Books & Manuscripts Relating to Literary Forgery 400 BC-AD 2000. New Edition, revised and enlarged. London, Baltimore, MD: Bernard Quaritch Ltd, The Virginia Fox Stern Center for History of the Book in the Renaissance Johns Hopkins University.

2. What is the Bibliotheca Fictiva? – The Sheridan Libraries & University Museums Blog

3. Jesus Started A Chain Letter — And Other Hoaxes : NPR. November 29, 2014

4. Earle Havens, ed. Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries: Rare Books and Manuscripts from the Arthur and Janet Freeman Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection. Baltimore: Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University, 2014.