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Bianca Giacobone and Guido G. Beduschi report on an intriguing acquisition:
In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, comprised over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries — beautifully bound manuscripts carrying black ink annotations allegedly penned by Shakespeare; works written by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets; poems by famous priests and theologians — all of them in part or entirely fabricated.
It was an unusual task for a scholar dedicated to studying the truth, but Havens was adamant. “We have never before needed a collection like this more than we need it right now,” he told the Dean of Libraries at the time. The internet and the increasing popularity of social media were changing how information was written, disseminated, and consumed, giving rise to the phenomenon of fake news as we now know it. In such a “crazy, rapid-fire information world,” the collection of ancient lies and misrepresentations of facts contained in the Bibliotheca Fictiva could offer guidance on how to navigate the moment, demonstrating that “what’s happening now has, in fact, been happening since the very invention of language and writing,” Havens said.
His pitch was successful. Johns Hopkins University acquired the collection for an undisclosed amount and housed it in the wainscoted library room of the Evergreen Museum and Library, a 19th-century mansion in Baltimore.
The sellers were Arthur and Janet Freeman, a couple of book merchants who made their name in the tight-knit world of antiquarian booksellers by collecting fascinating literary forgeries. Their venture started in 1961, when Arthur Freeman, then a graduate student of Elizabethan drama at Harvard University, began acquiring sources on John Payne Collier. Collier, a well-respected 19th-century scholar, had caused a ruckus among his contemporaries when he claimed to have found thousands of annotations to a copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio, which he said had been penned by a contemporary of Shakespeare — but was in fact forged by Collier himself.
In the decades that followed, Freeman, who died in 2025, assembled a vast array of literary fakes, collecting books whose content is deceiving in nature. These included poetry purported to have been written by Martin Luther, who was not much of a poet, or reports of Pope Joan, a woman who, in the Middle Ages, disguised herself as a man and was elected Pope, only to be caught out when she suddenly gave birth in the middle of a procession in Rome. The latter myth was perpetuated for centuries and was not firmly debunked until the 17th century.
There’s more at the link; we’ve discussed imaginary books (not quite the same thing) in 2014 and 2024. Thanks, Nick!
