After this hydrochloric sleight of hand, De Caro might have gotten away with his forgery if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids! Nope, wrong forgery case. De Caro might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t tried to fabricate an entire book, complete with Galileo’s signature, original illustrations, binding, and replica stamp from the personal library of Federico Cesi (Galileo’s patron and founder of one of the most important scientific fraternities in seventeenth-century Rome). With so many variables, De Caro was bound to make a mistake (well, many mistakes actually) along the way.
That’s not to say he didn’t take clever shortcuts. Rather than fabricate the book binding from scratch, he found one that already existed. Also, he nestled his forgery among authentic Galileo works, all of which were subsequently bound together as a Sammelband in an actual seventeenth-century vellum binding. This is the literary equivalent of a turducken: a forgery inside an anthology inside a genuine leather cover.
Minute differences in sewing techniques and threads would later form some of the most unequivocal evidence proving the fraud. Initial investigations, however, took for granted that the binding was authentic to the time period. Just as De Caro had hoped. After all, why go to the effort of fabricating “antique” leather and cardboard when you can let some poor schmuck from the seventeenth century do it for you?
Back before humanity discovered cardboard (an important date to mark on your calendar, along with other man-made materials such as plastic, neoprene, and whatever the hell is in chicken nuggets), the boards forming the front and back covers of a book were made from heavy, relatively expensive slats of wood. It’s amazing to handle a book with wooden boards: the weight in your hands works as a sort of sensory subtext, making the book seem that much more impressive. But after the explosion of print in Europe, these wooden covers would prove economically and physically impractical. Just think of all those poor schoolchildren having to carry around textbooks weighing fifteen pounds apiece. (Kidding. Those kids didn’t go to school; they picked through garbage heaps so books could be made for rich white guys.)
In order to cut costs and facilitate production, printers replaced the wooden slats with cartonnage (basically cardboard with a consistency closer to papier-mâché). But no gentrified man worth his weight in neck doilies would be caught dead carrying around a cardboard book, so binders covered the unsightly boards with a material as beautiful as it was sturdy: leather.
Today, most books are covered with decorative paper. About a hundred fifty years ago, cloth was the preferred material. For the hundreds of years before that, leather ruled the world of bookbinding.
As collectors of earlier imprints know, leathers from different sources result in different physical traits. One of the primary materials used in the early years of printing was vellum, made from the skins of calves, sheep, goats, or any convenient hide of high quality. Vellum tends not to be dyed, so these bindings most often appear white or cream colored. Some vellum bindings are so starkly white that they seem to glow like resplendent angels. Resplendent angels wearing something else’s skin, but angels nonetheless.
When cowhide is tanned (instead of degreased), it’s not called vellum; it’s called calf, which is the most common leather binding. Now, if an eighteenth-century book owner wanted something really fancy, he’d choose morocco, made from goatskin. Morocco is a more expensive material, known for taking dye much better than other types of leather. Morocco bindings are truly stunning in their vibrant blues, greens, and reds. It’s a pretty safe bet that if you see a shelf of leather-bound books in these hues, it’s filled with morocco volumes.
Pigskin was occasionally used in certain locations, especially during the first few centuries of print. A blind-tooled alum-tawed German pigskin binding from the sixteenth century is a magnificent sight. That description probably means little outside the rare book world today, but it sure meant something to a sixteenth-century Jew looking to bind his copy of the Talmud. There have actually been cases when pigskin was used as the covering to books of Jewish scripture—which technically would have made their holy book no longer kosher. Unsurprisingly, European binders were more accommodating to their Gentile clientele, and at times that clientele had very specific tastes when it came to bindings. Books of erotica, for example, were sometimes bound in fur. Because of course they were.
De Caro’s Sidereus Nuncius was not bound in fur (which would have been indicative of more “terrestrial” telescopic observations on Galileo’s part); it was bound in vellum. Yet, baby farm animals weren’t the only ones being used for bookbindings. Any animal that could be skinned has probably ended up around a book at one time or another. The skins of buffalo, snake, shark, salmon, frog, eel, and wallaby have all been used to bind books, as has ostrich shin (not skin, mind you, shin).
While rather uncommon, and obviously unethical, there are even examples of human skin being used as book leather. One American specimen comes from the Narrative of the Life of James Allen, a memoir of a nineteenth-century highwayman written while he was in prison awaiting execution. This armed robber had finally been brought to justice with the help of a man named John Fenno. Prior to his execution, Allen requested that his memoir be bound in his own skin and delivered to the man who had helped capture him. The book, completed in Boston in 1837, was indeed bound in Allen’s skin, and delivered to and kept by the Fenno family for about seventy years before being donated to the Boston Athenaeum.
While owning a book made from human skin might justifiably make your own skin crawl, the more important question is: Who in God’s name made the binding leather from James Allen? Who pulled his body out of the execution chamber and thought, Well, it was his final wish, so I’ll just go ahead and make a book out of him? James Allen the highwayman was dead, but the monster who skinned him, dried out his hide, and then sewed it into a book was walking the streets of nineteenth-century Boston. Freely.
Thankfully for De Caro, vellum was a perfectly acceptable binding for Galileo’s seventeenth-century anthology. He just had to ensure that his treatise fit seamlessly among the authentic sections. In order to accomplish this, he needed to address the edges of the book.
Historically, a book’s edges have been a canvas for displaying wealth. Gilt decoration, in which gold is applied to the outer edges of the text block, immediately comes to mind. In many books, only the top edge will be gilt. This serves two purposes: to make it beautiful (very important) and to form an extra barrier to keep dust out of the pages. In order to trick out his reconstructed anthology (but, really, to cover up the scars of his Shelleyesque book surgery), De Caro inserted his forgery, cut five millimeters off the fore-edge of the entire text block, gilded the sucker, and pressed a decorative pattern into the gilt, a technique known as gauffering. This made it appear that both the authentic pages and the forged pages of the anthology had all been cut, gilded, and gauffered at the same time. Which they were. Just four hundred years later than the Italian book dealer was claiming.
De Caro chose to decorate the fore-edge of his text block with a spotted, abstract design that fit the era of the binding, but there are other, more elaborate ways a wealthy patron might display his status on a book’s edges. An artist could be hired to create a one-of-a-kind fore-edge painting, for example. These strange works of art are made so that they’re indiscernible when viewed directly from the front, but bend the block of pages in just the right way and—voilà! A secret painting appears!
Scenes of quotidian life, landscapes, religious motifs, and floral panoramas were common enough, but if someone shelled out the cash for an artist to hand-paint a concealed scene onto a book’s fore-edge, what do you think a favorite subject would have been? If you guessed porn, then here’s a gold star for you. Scenes of erotica were a popular subject for hidden paintings in books. Because nothing classes up your 1893 edition of The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow like gentlemen and gentlewomen fornicating on the fore-edge.
From 2005 to 2012, the book dealer Rich
ard Lan sent De Caro’s Sidereus Nuncius to scholars and forensic investigators on two continents for inspection. De Caro’s was perhaps the most successful book forgery of modern times, but he was still caught. Once doubt crept into the minds of the experts, it took only a few weeks for them to unmask a forgery that had taken more than two years to create.
Ultimately, it was small technical developments made throughout the hundreds of years of Western printing that undid De Caro’s multimillion-dollar fake. In retrospect, a number of the fooled scholars were mortified to admit that there were signs everywhere. The depth of the pressed type, a faulty capital P, the sewing pattern on the binding, even the absence of wax on the binding thread became kindling for De Caro’s eventual and inevitable immolation. Yet the book dealer’s fall wasn’t entirely a result of gaps in his knowledge of the history of print. Flawed people created that history, and in the end, De Caro proved to be De Caro’s worst enemy.
Conmen like to produce a clever story to hide their real intentions. After the forgery was discovered, De Caro made the claim that he had “inserted a minor error or two,” thinking that if he didn’t, it would be impossible for history ever to uncover his masterful deceit. In a work of absolute perfection (which his Sidereus Nuncius was in fact not), De Caro asserted that minute marks of imperfection had to be added in order to balance out the universe. Like some kind of holy stigmata, a blemish would linger in the midst of perfection, reminding the common folk of the human origin of De Caro’s work.
On the personal stamp of Federico Cesi, the storied owner of the Galileo anthology, De Caro and his alleged colleagues closed a tiny gap in the inner decorative border, one that is left open in every other authentic example of the Cesi bookplate. Because stigmata come in twos, he included a typo on the title page, changing the Latin word periodis (meaning “periods,” as in “orbit times”) to pepiodis (meaning jack-shit nothing because it’s not a real word). De Caro claims that this was his personal finger in the eye of the academic community. He has also asserted that this taunting of academia’s “mental pygmies” was the real motivation behind his forgery. This explanation is widely believed by the scholars involved in the book’s examination. “It is our thesis,” goes the definitive study debunking the 2005 Sidereus Nuncius, “that the [forgery] is a projected duel with the community of specialists.”
This is likely dramatic overstatement by both parties. The explanation for the forgery is probably much duller: money. New technologies such as photopolymer plates (a type of plastic sheet made through photographic processes) can re-create the look of a printed page and are much cheaper and easier to obtain than an actual printing press and the necessary fonts. Because of this, and the potential money to be made, someone, eventually, was going to try to fool the world with a forged rare book.
Hubris lurks in the heart of every forger. Forgers must believe they are smarter than everyone else, more meticulous in their details than even the experts in their fields. If this weren’t the case, they would never have the confidence to become . . . well, confidence men. Now that he’s been caught, De Caro has tried to write the whole thing off as a joke, claiming that only a “real expert” could bring him down.
Unfortunately for him, a “real expert” happened to be working in Georgia at the time. Both the Cesi stamp and the “pepiodis” typo caught the eye of Nick Wilding, a historian of science at Georgia State University, and a specialist in Renaissance studies. Initially, senior scholars blew off Wilding’s concerns. For example, the Cesi bookplate could be wrong without the entire printed treatise being forged. What were such quibbles next to one of the world’s most respected art historians assuring the world that the watercolors of the moon had been created by Galileo himself? It was a fantasy come true . . . the key word here being fantasy.
Wilding persisted, however, and began a series of discussions with one of the leading scholars on the project, Paul Needham. Skeptical at first, Needham nevertheless listened, and decided that there were enough red flags to take another look at De Caro’s copy. He took it to Columbia University and examined it next to an undisputed first edition. “With the two copies placed side by side, one feature after another . . . began to look suspicious, and within about twenty minutes Needham felt certain that [De Caro’s copy] was a modern forgery.” A flurry of emails followed between Wilding, Needham, Lan, and other experts throughout the United States and Europe. Once the excitement from one of the greatest finds in the history of science had worn off and the experts took a second look, this time primed for doubt, they easily broke the hollow façade of De Caro’s forgery.
So it was that in 2014, the initial study that celebrated the discovery of this Galileo “proof copy” had to be supplemented with a volume that basically debunked everything that had come before. The correction reads like a confession from some of the world’s most eminent book historians in the depths of serious soul searching: “not many results are worse than a refuted authentication.” As Wilding himself has noted, labeling the forgery a “masterpiece” is one way the humbled scholars licked their wounds: in other words, only a masterpiece could have fooled them.
Humanity’s capacity for brilliance is perhaps matched only by the depth of our egoism. Both materialize in the books we print—or, in the case of the Sidereus Nuncius, pretend to print. De Caro tried to pattern his life philosophy after that of Galileo Galilei. How this extended to international book forgery is a bit of an open question, but in the end, the two men did have at least one thing in common: their sentencing. Galileo, the Father of Modern Science, was sentenced to nine years’ house arrest by the Roman Inquisition for heliocentric heresy. De Caro, not the Father of anything, was sentenced to seven years’ house arrest by a much less notorious Italian court for being a thief.
2
FORGETTING MR. GOOSEFLESH
“WRITING BOOKS BY HAND MUST not be stopped because of printing!” Thus opens the seventh chapter of De laude scriptorum manualium (In Praise of Scribes) printed in 1492. That’s right, printed. One of the most important critical arguments we have against the newfangled technology of the printing press was spread by the self-same technology it crusaded against. This is not entirely unlike a modern blogger who bemoans the encroaching digital age, slamming the Post button over and over again while pining for the good old days when people communicated using artisanal stationery and fountain pens. Okay, we might have done that once or twice. As it turns out, even after five hundred years, people haven’t changed that much.
The author of In Praise of Scribes was a Benedictine monk named Trithemius. (That mouthful of a name is pronounced Tre-TAY-mee-us.) This monk’s objections to the fledgling printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg about forty years before, focused on arguments such as the superior durability and craftsmanship of hand-copied manuscripts. “Who may not perceive how great are the differences between handwriting and printing?” Trithemius declared.
Each technological breakthrough hits resistance somewhere. Undoubtedly someone, somewhere, has said, “Automobile carriages can never match the dignity and maneuverability of the penny-farthing bicycle.” Granted, that someone was your handlebar-mustachioed barista from last Tuesday, but historically speaking, technological advancement always picks up naysayers, and the printing press was no exception. Trithemius is the most infamous of those printing naysayers. Yet the main reason the world knows his name is because of the preservative power of print.
Consider, on the other hand, that the name Johannes Gutenberg appears in exactly zero printed books attributed to him. Zero. For almost three hundred years, there was no concrete evidence that Gutenberg was even the inventor of Western printing. In a grand twist of fate, the printing press preserved the life of one its greatest critics and all but erased the life of its creator.
Any schoolchild today can answer the question “Who invented the printing press?,” but behind the answer so easily given lies centuries of scholarship, sometimes ingenious, sometimes not, in order to match Joh
annes Gutenberg with one of the most important technological innovations in human history.
WHAT DO we know of Gutenberg’s birth? We know the place. He was born in Mainz, in what is now western Germany. As for his birthday . . . or birth year . . . or birth decade for that matter, we can only guess. Estimates place the date at sometime between 1396 and 1406. This means we don’t know how old Gutenberg was when he invented the printing press, or even how old he was when he died. As for his death, we can only guess at those details as well. Given that this was the fifteenth century, we’re just going to assume that it was painful and involved a shocking amount of bloodletting.
We do know his full name: Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, but even this behemoth took considerable effort to sort out. “Gensfleisch,” “Laden,” and “Gutenberg” refer to German households, with the Gensfleisch family owning the houses Laden and Gutenberg. This patrician system would fall apart by 1428, but by then it was too late, young Johnny Gutenberg already had an absurdly long last name. Even the name Johannes is not so simple in the historical record. Other common medieval derivations of “Johannes” that have been applied to Gutenberg include “Henchen,” “Hengin,” “Henne,” “Henn,” “Hans,” and “Hansse.”
Not understanding the intricacies of fifteenth-century German social structures, some later scholars thought Johannes G. zur L. zum Gutenberg was in fact two separate people: the brothers Johannes Gensfleisch (literally translated as “Jonathan Gooseflesh”) and Johannes Gutenberg (or “Jonathan Goodmountain”). Of the many confused stories told about these two “brothers,” it was said that not only were they responsible for the introduction of European printing, but they were also extremely shady dudes. The older brother was reportedly a thief who stole the secret of movable type from a master to whom he was apprenticed, and the younger brother was a heartless hound who broke off his engagement with a German maiden from Strasbourg. Amazingly, this dually libelous opinion of Gutenberg persisted even into the nineteenth century. It’s one of those unfortunate quirks of history that for four hundred years, scholars knew very little about the inventor of the printing press, but they were pretty sure he was a scoundrel.
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