Description
The Very Good dust jacket, gray with brown border. Small tear at head of spine and corner rub wear. A mylar dust jacket has been added. The Near Fine binding is red cloth over boards with black cloth-backed. Two small red ink marks on outside page edges on bottom and top. Does not affect any text. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 9.5″ tall x 7.8″ wide.
Stated: First Edition
About the book (from the dust jacket)
Charles Hamilton calls the faked signature “easy to identify,”‘ and so will the reader of this book-once he knows what to look for. This is information of immense value to the collector and historian. Well-executed forgeries and fakes have fooled dealers and collectors for more than a century. This thoroughly documented book, containing hundreds of examples that show how to identify the best that the most skillful forgers have produced, will provide the expert and the amateur with his tools for self-protection. Great Forgers and Famous Fakes is also a chronicle of the careers of America’s most adroit and colorful manuscript forgers, telling who they were and how they swindled their victims. (The Cosey forgery above is identified on page 6).
The fascinating stories of forgers their works include: –the poet who forged hundreds of -the multimillionaire Robert Frost manuscripts—the multimillionaire industrialist and founder of RCA who got his start as a forger—years later got fooled by his own fake—the American Nazi who forged Howard Payne’s “”Home, Sweet Home”–a round-dozen forgers of Abe Lincoln’s handwriting–the historian who faked a document to create a new national Independence Day–the great financier turned forger who fabricated even the autographs of his own friends—Thomas Chancellor, who sold a “unique” pocket bible inscribed by Stonewall Jackson and promptly sold eight more –Eugene Field II, the man who forged his father’s poems—Clifford Irving, who came close to pulling off the hoax of the century with his autobiography of Howard Hughes.
About the author (from the dust jacket)
Charles Hamilton, the world’s foremost authority on autographs, has made full use of his more than half a century in the manuscript field to detail these histories, using over 400 illustrations showing the differences between genuine and fake. Along with a chapter on “Thirteen Rules for Spotting Forgeries,” this entertaining and intriguing book will be invaluable for collector, dealer, and scholar alike and will delight everyone with its accounts of literary and historical sleuthing.
