[78-L] Autographs

[fnarf at comcast.net]

> And,  she was one of the first and most successful to pull a very irritating 
> scam:  She had a ton of bookplates printed up which say "From the library of 
> Jack London" with an illustration of a wolf's head.  Her original plan was 
> to make sure that all his books which had been in the house when he died 
> were so marked.    But there seems little question that she ended up 
> slapping them into books which Jack London had never even seen,  much less 
> owned.

This kind of thing is extremely common. Some ridiculously high percentage of "autographed" or otherwise "associated" copies of books are fakes, ranging from real signatures tipped into a book that they were never near in the writer's life, to out-and-out forgeries (which are not hard to do, but are often hard to spot). John Dunning devoted one of his excellent "Cliff Janeway" books, about a detective-cum-bookseller, to the subject, "The Sign Of The Book".

I've never understood the appeal, myself. A simple autograph -- what does that do for you? It's celebrity-worship, I suppose; the glow of proximity; but unless there's some content to the inscription, like one of Vladimir Nabokov's famous butterfly drawings (which add tens of thousands to a book's price) or a long personal inscription to someone (I have a novel by Bernard De Voto with a several-page-long letter to a friend in the front matter), I don't see the appeal. A cancelled check? Does that increase my understanding or appreciation of Gershwin's music any? How much would you pay for a pair of his socks?

-- 
Steve