“But the entire tale – sausages and all – was made up by Wise.”

June 29, 2024 5:06 PM

Gill Partington recounts the story of Thomas James Wise in the London Review of Books and the LRB Podcast. Wise was the doyen of Victorian bibliophiles, and might the most prolific literary forger in history. Thomas J. Gearty jr. wrote a brief survey of his forgeries in 1973. You can see images from Wise’s work, with explanations by librarian Alexander Johnston, on the University of Delaware Library website.
posted by Kattullus (6 comments total)

Well, this is awkward.
posted by thomas j wise at 6:08 PM on June 29 [30 favorites]

(More seriously, when I was at the Bronte Parsonage Museum I read a chunk of Wise's letters with and about Ellen Nussey, to whom we owe nearly all of Charlotte Bronte's surviving correspondence. The poor woman was no match for him, and he was unpleasantly aware of it.)
posted by thomas j wise at 6:11 PM on June 29 [5 favorites]

Kerns’ phenomenological turns burn,
awkwardly unmet where they’d otherwise
typographically be applied. Discern
this & symbolically (or not) despise
unwise applicators of novelty
leaning in technologically. Angels
left, treadlessly; machines’ deus’s free:
unspinning Jacquard's cards fantastic spells,
spilling beans countlessly, amplifying
music automatically tuned, eating
electrons endlessly; delivering
detailed reports all the while. Entreating
imagination, we escape the shell
and, universally, retrieve as well
posted by HearHere at 8:27 PM on June 29 [3 favorites]

The Thomas J. Gearty jr. wrote a brief survey of his forgeries in 1973 link documents Wise's practice of cutting pages from old books and re-assembling them for his own nefarious purposes. The forensic bibliophily described is pretty cool "The distance between the stab-holes varies from book to book; therefore, if a leaf has been removed from one copy and placed in another, its stab-holes will not match".

In 1973, my SO started doing French and Arabic at college. Her Arabic teacher was double jobbing as curator at the Chester Beatty Library and razoring out pages from illustrated mss and selling them to collectors. Turns out that these gorgeous works of art were ancient but not "priceless".
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:31 AM on June 30 [2 favorites]

Superb, HearHere.
posted by doctornemo at 8:51 AM on June 30 [1 favorite]

There's a story in Gene Wolfe's amazing novel Peace about a clever book forger. I wonder if he knew this tale.
posted by doctornemo at 9:11 AM on June 30