LETTERS of the LITERARY FORGERS - H. BUXTON FORMAN and THOMAS J. WISE Forgeries
BETWEEN THE LINES: Letters and Memoranda Interchanged by H. Buxton Forman and Thomas J. Wise. Foreword by Carl H. Pforzheimer, introductory essay and notes by Fannie E. Ratchford.
Correspondence between a bibliographer/bookseller and a collector who worked together to produce and sell many literary forgeries.
AUSTIN: The University of Texas Press, 1945. LIMITED EDITION, one of only 525 copies.
Hardcover Book, gilt top edges, 6.5x9.5 inches, xii + 38 pages of text + 35 facsimile plates, including some that fold-open. No slipcase.
The book is in VERY GOOD, light foxing to the blank endpapers, otherwise sharp cornered, tight, bright, clean, clear and unmarked.
About FORMAN and WISE and their LITERARY FORGERIES (from Wikipedia):
******Henry Buxton Forman, b.1842 d.1917, was a Victorian era bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller who wrote bibliographies of Percy Shelley and John Keats. In 1934 he was revealed to have been in a conspiracy with Thomas James Wise, b.1859 d.1937, to produce and sell large quantities of forged first editions of Georgian and Victorian authors.
In 1887 Henry Buxton Forman and Thomas James Wise, a London commodity broker and book collector, began producing literary forgeries, often using an apocryphal Philadelphia Historical Society as a cover. Numerous forgeries were produced over the next fifteen years. They specialized in early pamphlets, supposedly privately published, of poets some of whom such as Rossetti and Swinburne were still living. Dates, places of publication, publishers (as distinct from printers) led the collecting world to believe in these 'rare private' editions. Buxton Forman and Wise forged publications by: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, George Meredith and William Thackeray and many others. Many of these forgeries were sold to collectors across the English speaking world. It would be forty years later that their fraud would be discovered by John Carter. The extent of the forgeries was such that the Brayton Ives sale in New York in 1915 contained twenty four forgeries.******