De Caro’s choice of Galileo was anything but serendipitous. He claims that, ever since he was a boy, his admiration for the seventeenth-century Father of Modern Science bordered on obsession. While most American teenagers in the 1980s were reading a mixed bag of The Scarlet Letter, X-Men, and Playboy, De Caro boasts he was sitting in a library picking his way through 4,200 pages of Galileo’s known letters. In 2007 he would publish a two-volume biography of Galileo, a labor of love that William Shea, a Galileo expert, would later compare to “an extended undergraduate paper with no quotations—the kind of thing an American student would pull off the Internet.”
An astronomer who lived three hundred-plus years earlier became De Caro’s moral compass. De Caro saw Galileo as a nonconformist and a rebel—the original rebel, really. James Dean, with his tousled bouffant and head-on collisions, had nothing on Galileo, with his receding hairline and peaceful death in bed from heart palpitations. In De Caro’s estimation, Galileo was a giant among men—which, coincidentally, was also Galileo’s estimation of himself.
Don’t get us wrong: Galileo is worthy of admiration. He was a visionary who had to fight to convince people of the realities he observed through his telescope. His support of Copernicus’s theory that the sun does not revolve around the earth is one of his more famous fights. It is worth noting, too, that during his struggles against the Catholic Church, Galileo called his priestly critics “mental pygmies,” “dumb mooncalves,” and persons “hardly deserving to be called human beings.” This could only have endeared him more to the teenage De Caro. As a brilliant man who was “vehemently suspected” of heresy, Galileo became De Caro’s patron saint of Science and Rebellion and Sticking It To The Man. “I wanted to use the philosophy of Galileo against [the scholars],” De Caro claimed to New Yorker reporter Nicholas Schmidle after De Caro’s crimes were uncovered.
Defending forgery, embezzlement, and petty larceny by pointing to Galileo’s lifelong struggle to drag the Catholic Church kicking and screaming into the Scientific Revolution is a weak justification for his crimes. Nevertheless, De Caro tried to position himself as a modern-day Galileo, fighting his own “mental pygmies”—who, in his mind, constituted all the scholars alive in the world today. Instead of blasting them with a groundbreaking scientific treatise, however, he would boldly fake someone else’s groundbreaking scientific treatise and sell it at a fraction of its current market value. The fools!
Let’s not kid ourselves. It was more likely about the money.
As the director of the Biblioteca Girolamini in Naples, and using connections he made with libraries all around Italy, De Caro began systematically stealing authentic imprints by Galileo and other writers. His thefts initially went unnoticed because he replaced these authentic editions with his forgeries. This strategy allowed him to sell real Galileos without risking his fakes on the open market.
And that market was ravenous. In recent years, collectors have craved the “high spots,” that is, the best-known and most beloved books within any given subject. For literature, this means books such as Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. For exploration, it means the accounts of Lewis and Clark’s expedition or Captain Cook’s voyages. In the past twenty years, major works in the history of science have jumped in popularity in the rare book world. To misquote the esteemed fashion mogul Jacobim Mugatu from Zoolander, “Science, so hot right now. Science.” Copies of the first edition in English of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, the work that first outlined the laws of motion and gravity, were being sold by dealers for around twenty thousand dollars in the late 1990s. Yet comparable copies were being sold by those same dealers in the early 2010s for around seventy-five thousand. Not every book has seen such an incredible jump; in fact, it’s rather unusual. Yet when you combine two major collecting trends (in this case science and high spots), the market loses its goddamn mind. Thus, to a rare book dealer, De Caro’s choice of Galileo as the subject of his forgeries reads more “criminal trying to get the most bang for his buck” and less “Galileo is my hero, OMG, I want to be just like him!”
When forging a book such as Galileo’s, one of the most obvious places to start is the paper. De Caro knew this, and reportedly studied papermaking by hand in Italy. He took this knowledge to Argentina, where he enlisted the help of a book dealer—allegedly; the case still hasn’t been brought to trial—and a local artist. Together they manufactured authentic-looking sheets of “rag paper” to use in the Galileo forgery.
Four hundred years ago, paper was made from rags (or, technically, the cloth fibers that make up rags). Rag paper sounds like something cheap, but in fact, it’s quite the opposite. In comparison to what we use today, rag paper was downright luscious, often thick and soft to the touch. This is one of the main reasons so many early printed books are missing blank leaves: owners would cut them out to use them for other purposes. A perfectly good piece of expensive paper, just sitting there not being used? What a waste! In the world of rare books, many collectors will still consider buying a fifteenth-century printed book that is missing blank leaves. That’s not the case for incomplete books from the nineteenth-century; collectors flee from them like they’ve just seen It peering out of a storm drain. Each time period has its own rules for collecting. What’s okay in one era isn’t necessarily okay in another.
Back in Galileo’s time paper was so expensive that, when printing a book, the cost of the paper could easily equal the cost of everything else combined, including the labor of the compositors and pressmen. The cost of paper varied depending on the quality of the cloth rags broken down and reformed into paper. The nicer the rags, the nicer (and more expensive) the paper.
Scarcity of supply was a constant problem for paper manufacturers. The sixteenth-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, who founded a paper mill for printing his own books, requested donations so often that his pleas were nicknamed “rag sermons.” As the need for paper grew, men, women, and children of the lower classes were often employed as rag pickers, making their living sifting through refuse piles to find bits of cloth to sell to the paper mills. If you happened to be employed as a young rag picker (and we use the term employed here loosely), you would be keeping your seven-year-old eyes open for linen cloth, the diamonds of the garbage heap.
Clothing in the seventeenth century was made primarily of wool (from sheep) or linen (from the fibers of the flax plant). Wool fibers were not ideal for paper production because they gummed up and matted together when wet. Linen worked quite well, though. This meant that paper mills could transform old stockings and used underwear into books, newspapers, and treatises that revolutionized the very foundation of scientific understanding. This is one of the reasons that paper from the first few hundred years of print can feel so delectably supple: its texture resembles that of fabric (read: your favorite pair of underwear) more than the paper we use today.
Just like most forgers, De Caro would have known that 1844 marks an important date in the development of paper production. That was the year when wood pulp was successfully added to the industrial production of paper. Wood was much easier to obtain, so its inclusion made papermaking enormously cheaper. Of course, the paper feels different as a result. Add sawdust to a loaf of bread, for example, and it won’t “taste better” or “be palatable in any way,” but it will be more economical to produce. Replace linen rags with wood pulp, mix in a healthy dose of the Industrial Revolution, and voilà!, you get a cheaper, mass-produced, gross-tasting paper. And yes, we learned that last tidbit from experience: not by eating paper ourselves, but by observing which books have been eaten by something else.
Allow us to explain.
Wormholing is the term that bookdealers use when describing paper damage caused by book-boring insects. These “bookworms” like to munch tunnels through nice, clean cloth, but for some reason have an aversion to chemically bleached industrial wood pulp. Unsurprisingly, wormholing can be found commonly enough in books, especially those f
rom the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but by the nineteenth century it pretty well disappeared. While evidence of wormholing isn’t exactly preferred by collectors, it rarely hurts the value of the book in a significant way.
Not only did bookworms take a blow from the introduction of wood pulp to paper, but so, too, did those little ragpickers from the refuse dumps. “Picking” took a downturn, and countless trash-sorting children sadly found themselves unemployed. (Cheer up, kids, you’re just in time for the Industrial Revolution, when there will be plenty of bone-grinding machines that need tiny fingers to clean them.)
The introduction of wood pulp inevitably changed the tactile sensation of paper. If you were holding an 1885 first edition of Huckleberry Finn, for example, the pages would feel noticeably stiffer than the pages of an 1818 first edition of Frankenstein. The paper used in the latter would be rag-based, and therefore softer to the touch. If you’re a collector, such details are all part of the joy of discovery. For a forger, however, they’re a nearly insurmountable challenge. One of De Caro’s other Galileo forgeries was uncovered in part by the out-of-place stiffness of his paper.
It would also be hard to miss the difference in smell over time. Think about the oldest book you own. For most people who are not rare book dealers, this would possibly be a beloved childhood copy of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps that you found in the back of your closet. You slowly crack open those pages, and you can just smell how great the paper is. Such a wonderful moment. This is how a book is supposed to smell, you think. All nostalgic and well worn and luxurious.
Well, you’re wrong. You’re not smelling luxury when you crack open those aged pages; you’re smelling the inherent cheapness of paper. Wood pulp contains an aromatic organic polymer called lignin, which gives paper made after 1844 a vanilla-like smell over time. While this aroma is one of the single most pleasant experiences to a modern-day bibliophile, for most of the history of print that smell did not exist in books because they weren’t composed of materials with a high percentage of lignin. You didn’t want pretty smells in your books. You didn’t want any smells in your books. Besides the scent produced by lignin, odors are most often indicative of dirt, mold, or other unpleasant things an elementary school student might rub into her Scholastic copy of Goosebumps.
At least by the time he forged Sidereus Nuncius, De Caro was aware of the major pitfalls of fabricating seventeenth-century paper. He would have known that wood pulp was a dead giveaway, so, instead, he selected handcrafted rag paper. But the details always get complicated when it comes to the history of print. The definition of the word rag in papermaking has changed a bit over the past four hundred years, and this little fact became one of the most damning pieces of evidence against De Caro. The rag of Galileo’s day was made mostly from bast fibers, the basis for linen fabrics. The rag of today is most commonly made of cotton linters. Having cotton in your Galileo forgery doesn’t necessarily reveal the fraud, as both cotton and hemp were used to a degree in paper production at the time. But cotton linters are a smoking gun. As they might say on CSI: Miami, “That’s why De Caro wasn’t able to [puts sunglasses on] pull the cotton wool over everyone’s eyes for long.” (That will be the last pun in our book. That is cotton-based.)
Cotton linters are the thin, velvety fibers that remain stuck to the cotton seed after the ginning process. Separating cotton from its seeds manually has always been difficult and time-consuming, so the 1793 invention of the modern mechanical cotton gin was a major breakthrough for the papermaking industry. The machine used a roller combined with a sort of grid through which metal spikes pulled the cotton fibers free from the seeds. Unfortunately for De Caro, the cotton gin was invented one hundred eighty years after Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius was published. Worse still, the machines used to separate linters after ginning weren’t even available until the nineteenth century. These silky cotton scraps are a primary fiber source for making rag paper today, but they are anachronistic red flags in any book supposedly printed in 1610.
Sometimes we see what we want to see, however. With a little pigment coloring, a spell in a kitchen oven at 480 degrees Fahrenheit, and a dash of dirt rubbed into the corners and gutters of the pages, De Caro “aged” his paper convincingly enough that experts initially overlooked the presence of the cotton linters. Later inspection would reveal the rather elementary faux aging techniques that De Caro used. Even invisible fingerprints left by the forger were discovered, glowing brightly under UVA light.
For anyone to accept his forgery, De Caro knew that he would have to create a convincing and functional printing ink. Johannes Gutenberg came to a similar conclusion five and a half centuries earlier, though with presumably less criminal intent or Italian swagger.
Inks had been in use for thousands of years before Gutenberg’s press. Ingenious methods had been developed to add lasting pigment to inks, which included the color sepia extracted from cuttlefish, purple extracted from mollusks, gold from fish bile, red from cinnabar ore, blue from indigo plants, and yellow from saffron flowers. The black that went into writing inks came mostly from soot or iron salts.
In the Europe of Gutenberg’s day, iron gall inks (used primarily as writing ink) could be made only with the assistance of the female gall wasp. In order to reproduce, the gall wasp must lay her eggs into a tree, most often oak. A fairly mysterious process takes place wherein the site of the injection swells, filling with nutrients for the larva inside, which will break free from the hardened protuberance (the gall or nut) when it’s fully developed. (The scientific term for this is not “busting a nut,” but c’mon, it should be.)
Ink makers collected these unbusted oak galls, ground them up, and soaked them in water to extract the tannic acid, which was mixed with iron for coloring and bound with a vegetable gum. As widespread as iron gall was at the time of Gutenberg, however, writing inks were not ideal for use on a printing press. For one thing, the tannic acid was unsuitably strong. (Fans of Alien know that acid and metal are not friends under any circumstances.) Over time, the iron gall would eat away not only the metal type of a press, but also the fibers of the paper.
Binding properties were another problem Gutenberg faced with water-based inks such as iron gall. Printing ink has to be sufficiently fatty, or it won’t stick to the metal type. Bucking the popular inks of his day, Gutenberg created his own formula, a recipe whose precise makeup, incidentally, remains a mystery today. Recent tests suggest that his secret formula may have been most closely related to oil paints used by local artists.
Over the years, testing of antique inks has uncovered some fairly strange additives—for example, human urine. Why would you ever find urine in ink? Because the large leather balls used to transfer ink to the metal type of the press (looking not unlike comically oversize candied apples) had a tendency to become stiff and cracked over time. And what’s the best way to maintain the suppleness and youthful appearance of leather? Soaking it in pee. Apparently.
As he was creating the first printing ink, Gutenberg realized that vegetable oil would provide the fatty substance necessary to allow printing ink to stick to metal type. Along with the press itself and movable type, this ink was Gutenberg’s most important innovation, one that allowed for the success of his printing press in Europe. Linseed oil (expressed from flaxseed) was the primary vehicle for antique printing inks. Colored with carbon soot, this rich black ink served the world of printing since the 1400s. Not until the twentieth century did petroleum-based inks gain traction.
Because the basic composition of printing ink changed so little over the first five hundred years of movable type, De Caro was able to hide his Galileo forgery within a generous margin of ink error (think of kids playing hide-and-seek with the boundaries set as all of North America). It was virtually impossible for researchers to determine if De Caro’s book had been printed with fraudulent ink. Tests do exist that can give a clearer picture of an ink’s age (e.g., C-14 analysis), but those tests require invasive procedures. When you’ve
potentially got the world’s most breathtaking new discovery in the history of science in your hands, you tend to avoid slicing off pieces of it. Thus the printing ink was taken at face value, without further testing.
But De Caro still had to contend with an additional kind of ink for those fake Galileo watercolors—which would be scrutinized by the world’s most respected art historians. De Caro claimed that, with the help of an alleged accomplice in Argentina who had a background in pharmacology, he began testing the acidity levels of different inks available on the open market. For the watercolors, De Caro chose an India ink dating back to the 1800s that, when compared to modern inks, tested acceptably high on acid. Following a line of thinking that could be described in similar terms, De Caro resolved to find a way to age that ink artificially by two hundred years, transforming his unremarkable India ink into seemingly authentic seventeenth-century Galileo watercolors. And like many a harebrained alchemical scheme, his work started in the kitchen. With hydrochloric acid.
De Caro says he placed the forged pages, with their dark, fresh ink, on the top rack of a totally ordinary oven, then inserted a glass baking dish on the bottom that contained hydrochloric acid. Cranking the oven up to 480 degrees, he cooked the pages. The rising fumes from the acid oxidized the fresh ink, transforming it into a toasty sepia brown. In a kind of reverse Fountain of Youth, twenty minutes of roasting acid is equivalent to about four hundred years of natural aging. In the end, De Caro achieved the perfect marshmallow finish to his paper, and no one could easily dispute that the ink on his pages wasn’t placed there in Italy in the year 1610.
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