BOOK REVIEW: THE JUDGMENT OF EXPERTS

My interest in forgery stems from a college course that touched upon forgeries in early Christian texts. AAS has only furthered my interest in frauds as I began to look for forged items in the AAS collection. I quickly discovered that fraudulence is not an unheard of phenomenon throughout history. First in my search, and with the help of Assistant Curator of Manuscripts Ashley Cataldo, I was directed to look into the curious, and unbelievable, case of Mark Hofmann (1954–). His story is one that could fit into the plot of a dime novel or fictional tale.

Mark Hofmann was a book collector and missionary turned forger and murderer in the mid-1980s. Several of Hofmann’s earlier forgeries purported to be documents of historical importance to the Mormon Church. In 1985, Hoffman showed a New York dealer a small broadside called The Oath of a Freeman. It had been long reported that a printing of the Oath was done in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638/39. This would likely be the first thing printed in America north of Mexico, though no surviving copy was known to exist.

The broadside was offered to the Library of Congress for $1.5 million but ultimately the offer was declined because no conclusive evidence of the document’s genuineness could be found. The Oath was then offered to the American Antiquarian Society, who offered $250,000 with a number of stipulations requiring the dealers to try to establish the broadside’s authenticity at their own expense and to supply information about the owner of the Oath and its provenance. At this point negotiations ended.

Now that the sale had fallen through, Hoffman, heavily in debt, was desperate to free himself. In an effort to mislead authorities, he planted bombs which killed two people. He was severely injured when a third bomb accidentally exploded in his car. Subsequent investigations uncovered the forgeries and led to Hofmann’s conviction. He is now well known as a murderer and forger, yet his faked items have found a market of their own, some selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What I became most interested in after reading about The Oath of a Freeman was the idea that some forgeries could yet have found their way into the AAS collection. With further exploration, I learned that the collection already contained forgeries, frauds, and even counterfeited materials ranging from vouchers, money, and checks to pirated papers, forged signatures, and even portraits. Still, there’s a question of whether or not AAS knew these items were frauds when they were acquired. (Discussions of these materials can be found in the AAS blog series “Fraud Week.”)

Beyond these two examples, interesting still are all of the other materials in the AAS collection related to forgery and counterfeiting, such as counterfeit currency, forged letters and other fakes, and books on counterfeiting and hoaxes. But how does one accurately decipher whether or not something is a forgery? Nowadays, there are many ways to figure out what’s a fraud and what is genuine—namely advanced scientific methods such as ink and paper testing and handwriting analysis. Conversely, however, technological advances have allowed forgers and counterfeiters to create even more realistic duplicates.

Forgeries have a long history, which is one of the reasons why it can be so difficult to tell what is truly real. But to all those historians and collectors out there, don’t worry—fakes can still turn out to be important pieces of history nonetheless. Here at AAS, our frauds have a special place in the collections. After all, they may have shaped the way that history, and the world, both was and is perceived.

To read the complete article, see:
materials in the AAS collection related to forgery and counterfeiting (https://catalog.mwa.org/vwebv/search?
searchArg=forgery&searchCode=SUBJ%2B&recCount=10
&searchType=3&page.search.search.button=Search)

To read the complete article, see:
Forging History: Making It and Faking It (http://pastispresent.org/2017/good-sources/forging-history-making-it-and-faking-it/)

To read the earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
MARK HOFMANN FORGERY FOUND? (http://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v05n19a08.html)
NEW HOFMANN BOOK (http://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v05n51a07.html)
MARK HOFFMAN BOOK (http://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v06n01a05.html)
HOFMANN BOOK: THE POET AND THE MURDERER (http://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v07n23a15.html)
FORGER MARK HOFMANN, TWENTY YEARS LATER (http://coinbooks.org/esylum_v08n44a20.html)

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