Exhibition Overview

Title page and frontispiece in a confessional memoir published in 1764 following the death of the forger known only as George Psalmanazar. It is unlikely that the portrait facing the title page is a true representation of the face of the impostor. Item #3.

Whether print or digital, text or image, artistic or scientific, rare or common, historic or contemporary, most of the content we encounter contains accidental mistakes–ranging from typos to factual errors to errors arising from prejudicial assumptions–and a significant proportion of it also contains deliberate misinformation resulting from various forms of forgery, fakery, and piracy.

We can all become better readers and better at protecting ourselves from those who wish to mislead us by improving our understanding of the nature of the content before us. Caveat emptor applies–reader, beware! The exhibition, the book/catalogue, and this digital resource are all intended to introduce the work of notorious and lesser-known book and document forgers, revealing the various ways in which experts and authors have faked their own identities over the centuries–ranging from carefully-selected pseudonyms to falsified ethnicities to fraudulent credentials–and exploring a number of shady publishing practices, including piracy.

We may find ourselves laughing out loud at the wide variety of weird and wacky enterprises, many of which have been reinvented for each successive generation and every new technology over centuries. We may be surprised to learn that forgeries are sometimes created quite by accident, that financial gain is not always the motive for shady practices, and that some reputations are–perhaps unjustly–more tarnished by such practices than others.