loss.” Fletcher switched to his haughty persona.
“Let’s keep on track here,” I said. “Just how and why did Meg Grantham’s papers find their way into your safe?”
“Meg,” he began, “is interested in assembling collections in different categories. Paintings. Music scores. Ceramic pieces. One prize example she’s done very well with is her collection of Canadian painters who showed at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto in the 1950s and ’60s.”
“Do all her collections have Canadian content?” I said.
“Not necessarily,” Fletcher said, shaking his head. “In the case of the papers in my safe, the collectible falls into the category of a forged rare book, and it’s English.”
“What you’re talking about now isn’t an authentic rare book, but a phony version of the rare book?”
“Correct.”
“I’m trying to figure out the value in the forgery,” I said. “Does it become so famous for its own illegality that it takes on some worth all by itself?”
“That’s roughly what happens, and Meg’s banking on it continuing to happen,” Fletcher said. “Actually, it’s also a fun thing for her. She thinks it’s amusing to have a printed work that owes its renown to a criminal act.”
“How about some names, Fletcher? Whose work got forged? Who did the forging? Otherwise my grip’s hanging loose on what you’re talking about.”
“Thomas Wise and Harry Buxton Forman,” Fletcher said. “We’ll start with them.”
I reached into my pocket for the iPhone and tapped in the two names.
“These guys were the forgers or the victims?” I asked.
“The scoundrels,” Fletcher said. “Two English book dealers of the Victorian years who had what they considered an ingenious idea. Everything they did was based on the fact that the first edition of a famous author’s first book brings the highest price when it eventually comes up at auction. So what Wise and Forman did was introduce to the book trade an edition of a work that they claimed had been published before what had been, until then, the accepted first edition. Is that clear?”
“Wise and Forman peddled a forged version that was a kind of pre-first first?”
“You could say so.”
“Who was the author these two guys picked for their scam?”
“They eventually forged the work of many writers, but they began with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The first version of her Sonnets from the Portuguese was published legitimately in 1850, and this was the poem, a very long poem indeed, that Wise and Forman got started with.”
“Ah-ha,” I said. “Every kid at my high school learned something from Sonnets from the Portuguese. There are forty-three sonnets, right?”
“Forty-four.”
“It’s the last one of the forty-four every school child learned.”
“Second last. And every kid at your high school probably remembered only the first two lines.”
“‘How do I love thee?’” I recited. “‘Let me count the ways….’”
My recital ran out of inspiration in a hurry.
“Ah-ha yourself, Crang,” Fletcher said, looking even more superior than usual. “That’s as far as you can go?”
I thought about punching Fletcher in the schnozz but settled for allowing him to get on with his tale of forgery among the Victorians.
“Wise and Forman — this was in 1894, many years after the first publication of Sonnets from the Portuguese — they printed a dozen copies of their booklet,” Fletcher said. “They used paper and type that looked authentically like something from much earlier. And they were careful about inventing a story to account for the poem’s re-emergence all those decades after it had been printed in, as they claimed, 1847, three years before the true first edition. It was a quite sophisticated apparatus Wise and Forman rigged, and it convinced all the scholars of the day.”
“Elizabeth Barrett Browning wasn’t around to object?”
Fletcher nodded. “She had died. So had everybody else who could have blown the whistle on the whole idea of an edition earlier than the real first edition.”
“Who eventually spotted the Wise and Forman version for a fake?” I said, entering notes into my iPhone. “And when?”
“A pair of young English booksellers named Carter and Pollard in 1934. These two had real science on their side. They worked typographical analysis of the typeface on the pages, chemical analysis of the paper, all of the science that proved the faked version of the poetry dated from much later than 1847.”
“Am I assuming correctly that Wise and Forman were no longer on the scene?”
“Forman had died years earlier, but Wise had the bad luck to keep on living for a few years after Carter and Pollard pulled the rug on him. The old fellow denied the forgeries to the end, even though it was shown that he and Forman had done the same thing with works by Tennyson, Rossetti, and scads of others.”
“But the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem was the best known of their fakes?”
“The reason possibly being that it was the one for which they first got caught.”
I glanced at Maury, who was back to checking out the girls in the passing parade.
“Maybe you should cool it with the ogling,” I said to him. “Or I might rat you out to Sal.”
“Just comparison-sampling,” Maury said. “None of the dames on the street out here can match Sal’s all-round pulchritude. That’s my conclusion.”
I turned back to Fletcher, who wore a frown of impatience.
“So Meg has an authentic Wise and Forman forgery of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning Portuguese Sonnets in her collection?”
“The forgery’s referred to in the trade as the Reading Sonnets because Reading was the town in England where they were supposedly printed.”
“And Meg’s the owner of an original Reading Sonnets?”
“Allegedly.”
“Allegedly?”
“Just so.”
“Allegedly, it’s an authentic forgery by the two frauds, but just maybe somebody else did a later forgery and peddled it as an original Wise and Forman con job?”
“The second alternative is a concern in the case of Meg’s document,” Fletcher said. “That’s why I’m investigating the authenticity of her Reading Sonnets.”
“And what’s your conclusion?”
“I
