From Tme-Tribune.com, writer Josh McAuliffe, we have an excellent article on an exhibition of fakes, forgeries and bogus relics on display at the University of Scranton until April 2nd. Read on!
"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.”
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