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Telling the Good From the Bad Relies on Science
Real or Fake Studies in Authentication by Joe Nickell. ISBN: 978-0-8131-2534-3
by Vic Chapman
It’s not always easy to tell the valuable from the dross; some things that appear compelling are merely facsimiles of desire. The last half century has seen a boom in the market for “collectibles” of all kinds—from Barbie Dolls to toasters and flashlights to those ridiculous ceramic plates with ugly pictures painted on them depicting syrupy scenes of rustic rurality, to God knows what else. This boom made everyone a collector of everything; people who stashed oddities of every kind away in hopes of getting rich someday when their ship comes in and their treasures receive the coin they’re worth from a public hungry to have them for themselves.
Of course where this kind of desperate market arises, criminality and two-bit fraud follow. Sometimes people buy fake Barbies or or replica plates with bad art printed—not painted—on them and when they do, their investment goes down a rathole. Collectors need not only assurance that what they do has meaning, but also insurance on what they confer meaning upon. This opens the way for authenticators of provenance, appraisers of value and vendors of pedigree, authenticity and proved rarities. And it gives Joe Nickell—author of several books on forensic detection—a reason to write a book that goes the extra mile as a kind of neophyte’s guide to not getting gulled.
Real or Fake is an important work that explains the science and method of investigation of documents, photographs and artifacts of all kinds. It does this in clear and unambiguous language and serves as an intro for the curious and collectors of all kinds of items that can be subject to fakery.
Sometimes, fakery can be one step removed; consider the autopen signature, a mechanical method of signing books or photos of famous people for public consumption. The signature in question is derived from an original that can be endlessly copied by a machine that more or less exactly duplicates it. Year after year, people think they've hit the motherlode of rarities with something signed by John F. Kennedy or Albert Einstein—and find out that they've got a collectible equivalent of a brick in a wall.
Nickell starts out wisely by illustrating what authenticity means; the component parts are provenance, which refers to the origin of an artifact and it’s traceability to a particular source; content, or internal evidence of an artifact, and material composition, what artifacts are made of—and whether they are whole, unaltered or newly created from old items and passed off as rare originals. Nickell tells of the spurious Hitler diaries and phony Jack the Ripper letters and of Van Meergeren’s fake Vermeers. He discusses how an old Civil War musket was supposed to belong to Confederate president Jeff Davis and how this was disproved. He even talks about one forger named Hoffman, who committed murder in order to hide his frauds, but strangely, doesn’t tell much about him, probably presuming that the reader might know of him already. This is one odd weakness in an otherwise captivating book.
Should one get into collecting, Real or Fake should be at the top of the list for intro reading on the traps collectors can expect to encounter along the way in their new world. For the price of a dinner in a mediocre restaurant, it offers an excellent insurance against being fooled, and it’s an engaging read anyway, even if you’re not a collector of anything at all.
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