21 December 2024
Choose wisely
An old waterlogged vellum book, with sand and seashells still stuck to its cover, which bears the words ‘My Secrete Log Boke’. Inside, an English account by Christopher Columbus of his second voyage to the Americas in 1493, written in his own hand. A preface explains that Columbus had sealed the log in a box and threw it overboard during a storm that he feared would take his life and that of his crew. Almost 400 years later, a Cornish fisherman had found the box off the coast of Pembrokeshire and rescued it. In 1946, this volume was offered to the British Museum Library by a hopeful private seller as a unique source for the history of European contact with the New World. Unfortunately for her, the Keeper of Manuscripts replied that he’d already got one.
My Secrete Log Boke: L.R.408.g.7.
The Log Boke was in fact a well-known literary forgery (that it was written in English being something of a clue). It had been offered many times before. The Keeper, Eric Millar (1944–1947), told the seller that it was ‘constantly brought in here’, including earlier that year, when Millar had advised the owner to stop by the next time they were in London and look at the Museum Library’s own copy. The volume was a creation of the German artist Carl Maria Seyppel, who designed and printed it in Düsseldorf in 1892.
The opening page of the Log Boke
Several such forgeries were offered to the British Museum Library between 1904 and 1954. In 1935, a private seller offered a letter by George Washington but Keeper H. Idris Bell (1929–1944) found that the signature was a deliberate imitation and the body of the letter was a clumsy forgery. He also noted that Christie’s just so happened to have a genuine Washington letter on display at the same time, writing dryly that ‘it is certainly a coincidence that they should have it at this moment’.
Fakes were not limited to the correspondence of the famous. In 1953, a well-meaning county archivist sent the Museum Library a set of Egyptian papyri but these turned out to be ‘forgeries of the kind usually manufactured by Egyptians for sale to tourists. They are made of small scraps of genuine, but blank, papyrus, pasted together to give them the rough appearance of scrolls, and covered with meaningless scrawls which, it was hoped, would be mistaken for Greek cursive handwriting’.
When a letter of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was discovered to be a forgery shortly after it was acquired in 1917, Keeper Julius P. Gilson (1911–1929) recommended that it be given to a professor at the University of Virginia who was interested in it as a literary curiosity. He wrote that this was possible ‘as it has not actually been incorporated in the collections’, referencing a peculiarity of the British Museum’s statutes.
Choosing the right acquisitions, and avoiding forgeries, was even more consequential at the Museum Library than at many rival institutions, as the Trustees could not normally remove items from the collection except by Act of Parliament. Under the British Museum Act (1769), they were authorised to dispose of duplicates of ‘Printed Books, Medals, Coins, or other Curiosities’; the Act of 1807 also allowed for the sale or exchange of items deemed ‘unfit to be preserved’ in the collection. Several such sales did occur but, after this policy caused Richard Fitzwilliam, 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam, to leave his library and art collection to the University of Cambridge in 1816, establishing his eponymous museum there instead of at the British Museum, the Trustees decided that no gifted or bequeathed item could be removed from the collection. If a Keeper chose poorly by accepting a manuscript that was later found out to be a fake, it would sit on the Department's shelves forever, occupying precious space. Keepers therefore had good reason to be cautious about which manuscripts they chose to accept.
Richard Fitzwilliam (1745–1816), 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam, whose collections founded the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge
These forgeries were just some of the manuscripts turned down by the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum Library, one of the British Library’s precursors, in the first half of the 20th century, as recorded in the archives of the Department of Manuscripts. Since October, this archival material has been used in a research project investigating rejected acquisitions and offers of manuscripts to the British Museum Library between 1904 and 1954, to see what these can tell us about collecting policy in the period. As the project progresses, future blogposts will highlight new discoveries and stories.
This research has been made possible by the award of a British Library Coleridge Fellowship.
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