[MSN] Fakes in focus.

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

03/16/2007 
Fakes in focus  
BY JOSH MCAULIFFE
STAFF WRITER
 

 
 From left is, Stephen R. Pastore, who collects fakes and forgeries, and
Michael Knies, University of Scranton Associcate Professor and Special
Collections Librarian, look over forged Adolph Hitler drawings.  

Photo:
http://www.thetimes-tribune.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18088188&BRD=2185&PAG=4
61&dept_id=450444&rfi=
 
If you go
What: "Harmless to Homicidal: A Collection of Hoaxes and Literary Forgeries"

Where: Heritage Room in the University of Scranton's Weinberg Memorial
Library
When: Through April 22
Details: The exhibit is free, and on display during normal library hours.
For more information, call 941-6341. 

It's no easy feat linking George Washington, William Shakespeare and Adolph
Hitler to one another. 

Yet there they are, three of the many high-profile victims of identity theft
featured prominently in "Harmless to Homicidal: A Collection of Hoaxes and
Literary Forgeries," the latest exhibit at the University of Scranton's
Weinberg Memorial Library. 

The exhibit, which will remain on display in the library's fifth floor
Heritage Room through Apr. 22, includes over 140 pieces of forged documents
and artworks collected over the last 15 years by Waverly resident Stephen R.
Pastore. 

A longtime book collector and author of bibliographies on Sinclair Lewis and
Thomas Hardy, Mr. Pastore first became interested in forgeries and hoaxes
after he bought what turned out to be some fake Art Deco statues from
Christie's auction house in New York City. Later on, he purchased a box full
of "inscribed" Sinclair Lewis novels autographed to people like Ernest
Hemingway and William Faulkner that eventually proved "clearly too good to
be true," he said. 

"You become a victim and things become interesting," Mr. Pastore said. 

"It's very difficult to fool people if they're naturally suspicious, but
they're not," he said. "People want to believe this stuff, that's a big part
of it."

The exhibit features a wide variety of high-profile forgeries, from a
Shakespeare letter forged by William Ireland during the late 18th century
that's among the only privately owned of its kind in the world, to a fake
George Washington letter from the Revolutionary War in which the American
general proclaims his admiration for Britain's King George III. Next to the
fake is a copy of an authentic Washington letter. The signatures look eerily
alike. 

For those interested in the artistic side of Adolph Hitler, there's a
display dedicated to several forged Hitler portraits, tipped off as fakes by
the fact that the Der Fuhrer couldn't draw the human figure. Alongside them
are some authentic Hitler landscape paintings, which, surprisingly, aren't
all that bad. 

"He certainly had a talent," Mr. Pastore said. 

Other highlights include: a titulus, or wooden placard, allegedly mounted on
Jesus' cross during the Crucifixion; a book examining the forged letters
attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots, in which she plots the overthrow of her
cousin, Queen Elizabeth I; and a Lord Byron letter forged by Wilkes-Barre
resident Major George Byron, who claimed to be a descendent of the British
poet. 

Several well-known forgers are featured, including Joseph Cosey, who was
extremely adept at duplicating Edgar Allan Poe's handwriting, and Mark
Hofmann, the infamous "Mormon Murderer." 

Mr. Hofmann, who has a forged Emily Dickinson poem in the exhibit, found a
lucrative niche selling fake anti-Mormon documents to Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints leaders, who were only too happy to pay vast sums to
hide them away. Mr. Hofmann's scheme went along without a hitch until the
mid 1980s, when he was arrested for murdering two people with mail bombs.
(In a nice bit of irony, Mr. Hofmann's forgery arm was rendered permanently
useless after he overdosed on some sleeping pills and slept on it for 12
hours.)

Among the hoaxes represented in "Harmless to Homicidal" are a rare pirated
copy of Clifford Irving's fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, and "Naked
Came the Stranger," an intentionally awful novel written in 1969 by staff
members at Newsday under the pseudonym Penelope Ashe. The reporters were
testing the theory that literary standards had fallen to the point where
people would read just about anything, and were proven correct when the book
became a huge best-seller. 

"It's really funny," Mr. Pastore said of the book.

On the flip side of the coin, the exhibit has a display case dedicated to
books alleging actual events to be hoaxes, like the Holocaust, Sept. 11 and
the moon landing.

"That's the problem with hoaxes," Mr. Pastore said. "It cuts both ways."

Contact the writer: jmcauliffe at timesshamrock.com