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and the collection itself, now in a university library, will surely be the laboratory for many interesting discoveries yet to be made.

BRUCE WHITEMAN Head Librarian Emeritus, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA

Earle Havens, ed. Fakes, Lies and Forgeries: Rare Books and Manuscripts from the Arthur and Janet Freeman Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection. , MD: Sheridan Libraries, University, 2014. 140 pp.; $35.00 (paperback) ISBN 9780983808664

This attractive illustrated catalogue accompanied an exhibition of selected treasures from the Bibliotheca Fictiva, a collection of approximately 1700 items, that was held at ’s Library from 5 October 2014 to 1 February 2015. Assembled with knowledge and discrimination over four decades by Janet Freeman and Arthur Freeman, who have a background in the antiquarian book trade and share a scholarly interest in literary and bibliophilic rogues, the Bibliotheca Fictiva is arguably the world’s pre-eminent collection of rare books and manuscripts representing the history of literary and historical forgery from the ancient world to the modern era. It is a resource of monumental significance for research into the primary sources of forgery, and so it comes as no surprise that the collection “had very much been used and promoted” soon after it was acquired by Sheridan Libraries in 2012. This extraordinary collection of research materials is further described in Arthur Freeman’s Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books and Manuscripts Relating to Literary Forgery 400 BC–AD 2000 (: Quaritch, 2014) (reviewed by Bruce Whiteman, above) and discussed in the proceedings from a 2012 international conference held in Baltimore titled “Literary Forgery and Patriotic Mythology in Europe, 1450–1800.” In his preface, Earle Havens explains that the Freemans “not only collected the most important, and indeed unique, editions of a given forgery,” but they also assembled “every major interlocutor about a given forgery – both defenders and demolishers of forgeries alike populate this collection, as well as the most recent secondary works of scholarship and reference that contextualize their latter-day reception” (v). As collectors, the Freemans warrant our respect for

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the diligence and care they have brought to the task of amassing such an impressive gathering of historical and literary fakes, forgeries, and hoaxes, and the Peabody Library deserves high praise for treating the Bibliotheca Fictiva as a “living collection” by continuing to augment it with further acquisitions (v). Havens reports that “over a century of additional volumes has been added to the collection since its arrival” (v). The collection will certainly grow in importance as the Peabody continues to develop and expand the collection, and the Freemans’ appreciable collecting achievement will become a legacy for future generations of scholars and students. The five essays that comprise the catalogue were written by a curatorial team of Johns Hopkins faculty and graduate students: Earle Havens, William Kurrelmeyer Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts; Walter Stephens, Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies; and PhD candidates and Denis Family Curatorial Fellows Janet Gomez (Italian), Neil Weijer (History), and John Hoffmann (English). Havens’s “Catastrophe? Species and Genres of Literary and Historical Forgery” may be of particular interest to researchers who are interested in the literary enterprise of forgery across the centuries and how it can be analyzed as a distinct form of literary production. It will perhaps come as a surprise for the reader, who might not have considered forgery as a distinct “literary” mode in its own right, that forgeries can be understood to constitute a complex literary genre “deployed for a wide range of purposes, and achieved through a set of expressive motivations and conventions, much like satire, irony, or comedy … Some literary forgeries might be said to encompass all three of those literary modes at one and the same time” (3). So why should we study forgery? For one, forgery can be explored as a meaningful literary phenomenon rooted in a multiplicity of genres, and like literature it invents its own fiction and truths. Further, this chapter amply demonstrates that the concept of forgery is rife with pejorative associations, and those who study the various forms of forgery and falsification might have many reactions to the investigative experience, “ranging from horror to hilarity, bathos to banality” (6). Whatever their reaction, researchers of forgery in all of its manifestations will likely agree with Havens that forgery has played a “profound role” in the construction of identity and historical consciousness (6). In the succeeding essays, Havens suggests that his co-curators’ investigation of particular elements of the Bibliotheca Fictiva do much to distinguish literary forgery from “other forms of literary expression” and insofar as students and scholars are interested in

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using the collection, these essays, taken together, are an indispensable introduction to understanding forgery as “an armature of deception” that has been at work in society for thousands of years. The study of historical forgery is discussed in Weijer’s “History Reimagined: Filling the Gaps in England’s Ancient Past,” where he explains that historical truth “has been perpetually evolving and drastically differentiates history as we know it today from history as it was taught and practised over the preceding centuries – that is, as an extension of literature and rhetoric” (43). Weijar grounds his essay in many fascinating examples from the Bibliotheca Fictiva to make the point that it is no simple feat to distinguish between authenticity and fiction when one considers how older histories were used and reused by successive generations, and evolving views of what really happened can alter what is considered to be true about historical sources. Stephens’s “Discovering the Past: The Renaissance Arch-Forger and His Legacy” offers a compelling study of a Dominican friar named Giovanni Nanni who made spurious claims that he discovered new information about the history of the Etruscans. Gomez’s “Scandal! Literary Fakes as Best Sellers” examines the nebulous relationship between literature and literary forgery with a consideration of several case studies, including William Henry Ireland’s forged Shakespearean play Vortigern (1796), Giuseppe Compagnoni’s forged diary of sixteenth-century poet Torquato Tasso, and George Psalmanazar’s claim to be a native of the unfamiliar island of Formosa (modern-day Taiwan). The collection of essays concludes with Hoffmann’s “Forged Identities: Race and Nationhood from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century,” in which he makes a convincing case that “forgers play upon the public’s credulity by indulging unquestioned assumptions” (112). In other words, to some unwitting readers of literary forgery, a text’s authenticity is never called into question if it confirms their own biases and prejudices. Overall, this is a splendid exhibition catalogue that is useful both for its lucid discussion of fakes, lies, and forgeries, and for its celebration of the Bibliotheca Fictiva as an impressive collection with significant research potential. The catalogue would have benefitted from additional illustrations of books and manuscripts from the display and a conclusion to summarize the essays, but these are minor concerns, especially when there are so many fine points to recommend this sophisticated publication. On a final note, the catalogue concludes with an annotated checklist of items from the exhibition that is a

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useful bibliographical tool and highly informative. As a work of scholarly interest, this catalogue is highly recommended.

ROBERT DESMARAIS University of Alberta

Adam G. Hooks. Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 207 pp.; $114.95 (hardcover). ISBN 9781107138070

While reading Adam G. Hooks’s new monograph, I could not help but recall my many classroom conversations about William Shakespeare. Despite my regular remonstrations about authorial intention, many of the most studious will still ask in all seriousness, “But what would he have wanted us to see in this scene?” Indeed, their uncertainties about the texts, magnified by the early modern language and the unfamiliar allusions, often cause students to fall back on hypothesizing about the author’s private emotional landscape, trying to connect points of biography to the work under discussion. Hooks opens his monograph with a variation on the same set of concerns, widening his reach to literary critics and historical biographers. He resists the long tradition that ties source texts to biography and productively examines “Shakespeare” as early modern literary construction; in fact, via detailed bibliographical work, Hooks offers readers the opportunity to consider the multiple “Shakespeares” that were designed to help sell texts in the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century world of books. In a sensitive discussion of the challenges faced when considering biography in concert with other scholarly approaches to historical work, Hooks (2016) posits that “perhaps what we need is a new kind of biography: a life in print” (7). Hooks effectively summarizes influential biographies of Shakespeare, and he criticizes the move to speculate about historical unknowns, suggesting that while the last approach “has revitalized biography in many ways,” it has also worked to further “a more romantic, or at least a more firmly individuated, Shakespeare that is incompatible with the collaborative processes responsible for the creation of his authorial persona” (12). Hooks’s work is at once “bio-bibliography” and “biblio-biography” (4, 5): he emphasizes the early modern book trade as a site for creating Shakespeare’s literary reputation, and he suggests that this first commercial activity had

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