Report from the Salerooms

Byron items have been more quality than quantity in the salerooms this year. Bloomsbury Auctions with their operations in Maddox Street and Godalming, with at least twenty-four auctions a year, have only had five lots specific to the poet, four of which were common copies of various works. The fifth lot, offered for sale in October, was a copy of Lord Richard Henry Holland’s Some Account of the Life and Writing of Lope Felix de Vega Carpio, published in 1806 and with a presentation from the author. Under the author’s presentation was inscribed ‘Received December 22^nd 1813 from yr Lord Holland by his friend & well wisher Biron.’ This was a forged inscription and the item did not sell, but it leads me on to two things: one, books need to be more than just themselves these days, they need to have an interesting provenance; and two – forgeries.

Bonhams Bond Street sale of 23 May 2012 had a large quantity of forgeries from the collection of Stuart B. Schimmel. Mr Schimmel was a noted book collector, a director of the Grolier Club, a director and past president of the Manuscript Society and also a former president of the Bibliographical Society of America. In 1979 he gave the first Robert F. Metzdorf Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘Living with Forgers’. In the lecture he explained that he did not ‘collect forgeries promiscuously; I collect forgers; that is, specific people who have achieved a certain notoriety in the field of forgery’. He then goes on to discuss his forgers and having worked his way through Chatterton, Ireland and others he arrives at George Gordon Byron, sometimes known as DeBibler, before moving on to Thomas James Wise, who he describes as ‘the greatest known forger’. The person with the accolade of ‘worst forger’ is John Payne Collier, not because he was incompetent at forgery but because he was a ‘great scholar. And when a scholar, like a policeman, goes bad, it’s loathsome’ said Mr Schimmel.

Lot 39 in this Bonhams sale was the aforementioned Lord Holland book, which sold for £37 including buyer’s premium. Two lots that provided more interest were Lot 16 – a fine collection of letters and proofs concerning the Schultess-Young forged Byron letters. These papers consisted of nine galley proofs from Wise’s Byron Bibliography and twenty pages of manuscript text, mainly unpublished, along with letters from John Murray and Maurice Buxton Forman, all housed in a specially made cloth case. Schultess-Young’s The Unpublished Letters of Lord Byron was pulped by its publisher, Richard Bentley, when he discovered that they were forgeries, with only a few copies escaping this fate. This lot sold for £1,500 including premium.

Lot 17 consisted of four letters by Major George Gordon Byron. Three of these were Byron forgeries: one to Hoppner dated Venice, 25 November 1818; one to Murray undated and unaddressed but on paper watermarked 1820; and one to Sir Godfrey Webster dated Genoa, 28 November 1822. The fourth letter addressed to ‘Dear Sir,’ and dated 257 Broadway, New York, 19 October 1849 was the Major writing as himself, protesting his innocence and the genuineness of the letters he was peddling. In 1847 Byron’s sister, Augusta, had refused to have anything to do with a proposed work by the Major entitled Byron and the Byrons. In 1849 in New York he proposed publication of a book entitled The Inedited Works of Lord Byron, now First Published from his Letters, Journals, and Other Manuscripts, in the Possession of his Son, Major George Gordon Byron. The New York Evening Mirror declared them, and him, a sham. This lot with the forger’s genuine letter fetched £1,125 including premium.

Staying with Bonhams, but at their Oxford saleroom, and moving on to provenance, Lot 300 in their June sale was George Frederick Handel, Semele. A Dramatick Performance in Score, the Words Altered from Congreve. The Music Composed in the Year 1743 (Arnold Edition, 1788). A presentation copy, inscribed on his behalf, from George III to Lady Judith Milbanke, later to become Byron’s mother-in-law. This...