Book Note:
Forgery and Theft, C & C
7 January 2014

¶ If you were gripped by Nicholas Schmidle’s New Yorker piece on Massimo De Caro, the Italian book forger who literally cooked the books, you’ll enjoy Travis McDade’s refresher about the Oath of a Freeman hoax back in 1985, to which McDade adds an interesting coda. (The Millions)

Much of the information in this piece came from the efforts of James Gilreath. As an Americana specialist at the Library of Congress, he was not only one of the first folks to examine the broadside in 1985, but he wrote about his experience, and encouraged others to do so, in a 1991 collection he edited called The Judgment of Experts. I sometimes assign parts of this work for a class I teach on rare book crime. But what is never made clear in this otherwise excellent book is whether Gilreath, who had worked at the Library of Congress since 1974, was already stealing rare books from that library’s collection when he went to New York to help authenticate Hofmann’s “Oath.”

Comments are closed.