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Stephen Clarke, Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts Relating to Literary Forgery, 400 BC–AD 2000. By Arthur Freeman, The Library, Volume 25, Issue 4, December 2024, Pages 511–512, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/fpae058
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ARTHUR FREEMAN’S BIBLIOTHECA FICTIVA, the catalogue of his collection of books and manuscripts relating to literary forgery, was widely welcomed on its publication in 2014. It provided a clear and extensive guide to the collection that he and his wife Janet Ing Freeman had formed over fifty years, beginning with the Shakespearian scholar-forger John Payne Collier, and then progressing ‘mostly backwards, and sideways’ to an extraordinary range of some 1,676 examples of deceptions and impostures that range from delusion to deceit, from wishful thinking to outright fraud.
Now, ten years later, there is a second edition. It is in very similar format and of similar dimensions, bound in blue rather than red cloth with matching endpapers and dust-jacket, and with the same layout of Preface, Acknowledgements, Over-view, and Handlist. But the book has expanded from 423 to 566 pages, containing some six hundred new entries to the Handlist, and the eighty pages of Overview now has twenty-three pages summarizing these additions. The thirty-seven illustrations of the first edition, one of them coloured, are upgraded to forty-one splendid colour illustrations and three black-and-white.
