[78-L] Autographs

[David Lennick]

Anyone remember a couple of years ago when there was an eBay dealer who kept 
trying to flog "autographed" Eddy Duchin LPs, all issued after his death?

dl

fnarf at comcast.net wrote:
>> 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?
>