The E-Sylum:  Volume 7, Number 23, June 6, 2004, Article 15

HOFMANN BOOK: THE POET AND THE MURDERER

  John Eshbach writes: "Another book about Mark Hofmann,
  by Simon Worrall, titled "The Poet and the Murderer," Penguin
  Books (ISBN 0-525-94596-20.    The book relates the story
  of a forged Emily Dickinson poem bought at a Sotheby's May
  1997 auction by the Jones Library in Amherst, MA.  A modern
  day who-done-it about the poem's provenance."

  Ralf W. Bopple of Stuttgart, Germany also noted the omission.
  He writes: "Did I miss something, or was the book 'The Poet
  and the Murderer' by Simon Worrall (2002) not mentioned
  in the discussion of books on Mark Hofmann?  If not, this seems
  a little odd to me, because it was discussed in an earlier E-Sylum
  issue. Maybe it was missed because the connection there is not
  related to coins, but rather to Hofmann's falsifications of Emily
  Dickinson handwritings.  While I immediately bought the book
  due to its link to Amherst / Massachusetts, hometown of my
  alma mater UMass, I can recommend it to anybody for the
  insight it provides into the world of counterfeiting of
collectibles."

  David F. Fanning also points this book out: "Meant to note
  last week, but here's another Hofmann book:

  "The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime
  and the Art of Forgery," by Simon Worrall (New York: Dutton,
  2002).

  It's written in that awful style of crime thrillers, but it's worth
  noting for its emphasis on Hofmann's forgery of an Emily
  Dickenson poem (actually--and this makes it all the more
  interesting--Hofmann had the audacity to not simply fake a
  manuscript of a known poem, but to write the poem himself
  in her style).

  The Salamander book (previously mentioned by someone else)
  is by far the best I've read on Hofmann, though it's still rather
  lurid for those of us more used to reading about coins.

  Have any E-Sylum subscribers attempted to correspond with
  Hofmann?"

  [Well, Hofmann has tried to correspond with one numismatic
   bibliophile, Armand Champa.  In his library Champ had a
  letter from Hofmann who'd written him about purchasing a
  coin, perhaps as fodder for one of his counterfeiting schemes.

  The controversy over publishing Larson's book on numismatic
  forgery, and David's note of the lurid aspects of the Salamander
  book remind me of my horror to find in print, in the transcripts
  of Mark Hofmann's jury trial, detailed information on how he
  made the pipe bombs that killed his unsuspecting victims.
  -Editor]

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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