Booking In. Jack Batten
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asked if we wanted coffee. Fletcher waved him off. He told Maury and me we’d all have coffee at a place he knew in the market. He was talking about Kensington Market, the historic old neighbourhood south of College.
“And you’ll tell us about the second set of papers that have gone missing?” I said to Fletcher
“Crang,” Fletcher said in his self-satisfied mode, “you’re going to find the story of these other papers hitting awfully close to home.”
Fletcher paused, still looking at me with his malicious little smile.
“Your home,” he said.
Chapter Six
The three of us were sitting at an outdoor wooden table on Nassau Street in the thick of Kensington Market’s commerce. Maury and I had cappuccinos in front of us. Fletcher went for a double espresso. Around us the sidewalks were teeming with beautiful young women in skimpy shorts or colourful summer dresses that didn’t reach midthigh.
“You ever seen so many first-class dames in your life?” Maury said to me.
“Only when I’m alone in a room with Annie.”
“And the clothes these girls got on, I can hardly believe it’s legal.”
“There was a time in this part of town,” I said, “everybody female dressed long and black.”
In the early twentieth century, modest rents for humble dwellings made Kensington Market the first choice in address for ethnic groups newly arrived in Toronto. It was the Jewish quarter first, where immigrants beating it out of Russia and Eastern Europe established their homes, shops, and businesses. Then, as the Jewish families grew flush and pushed north to roomier neighbourhoods, the market turned more heavily East Asian. Now, the area had morphed into a shopping centre for young people from all over the city hot after bargains in clothes, food, and electronics. Graffiti artists had gone nuts on the outdoor walls of commercial buildings, and the whiff of marijuana drifted on the breeze. To young Toronto, Kensington Market was the hip hangout of the moment.
“Gentlemen,” Fletch said, “let me tell you about my other client whose papers have gone missing.”
“You’ve got our full attention, Fletcher,” I said, though Maury, still tracking the girls, seemed less than deeply engaged in our conversation.
“The client,” Fletcher said, pausing for emphasis and wearing a sneaky smile, “is someone you’ve no doubt socialized with, Crang. I’m referring to none other than Meg Grantham.”
“I haven’t had the pleasure,” I said. “Not yet.”
“Your loss.” Fletcher switched to his haughty persona.
“Let’s keep on track here,” I said. “Just how and why did Meg Grantham’s papers find their way into your safe?”
“Meg,” he began, “is interested in assembling collections in different categories. Paintings. Music scores. Ceramic pieces. One prize example she’s done very well with is her collection of Canadian painters who showed at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto in the 1950s and ’60s.”
“Do all her collections have Canadian content?” I said.
“Not necessarily,” Fletcher said, shaking his head. “In the case of the papers in my safe, the collectible falls into the category of a forged rare book, and it’s English.”
“What you’re talking about now isn’t an authentic rare book, but a phony version of the rare book?”
“Correct.”
“I’m trying to figure out the value in the forgery,” I said. “Does it become so famous for its own illegality that it takes on some worth all by itself?”
“That’s roughly what happens, and Meg’s banking on it continuing to happen,” Fletcher said. “Actually, it’s also a fun thing for her. She thinks it’s amusing to have a printed work that owes its renown to a criminal act.”
“How about some names, Fletcher? Whose work got forged? Who did the forging? Otherwise my grip’s hanging loose on what you’re talking about.”
“Thomas Wise and Harry Buxton Forman,” Fletcher said. “We’ll start with them.”
I reached into my pocket for the iPhone and tapped in the two names.
“These guys were the forgers or the victims?” I asked.
“The scoundrels,” Fletcher said. “Two English book dealers of the Victorian years who had what they considered an ingenious idea. Everything they did was based on the fact that the first edition of a famous author’s first book brings the highest price when it eventually comes up at auction. So what Wise and Forman did was introduce to the book trade an edition of a work that they claimed had been published before what had been, until then, the accepted first edition. Is that clear?”
“Wise and Forman peddled a forged version that was a kind of pre-first first?”
“You could say so.”
“Who was the author these two guys picked for their scam?”
“They eventually forged the work of many writers, but they began with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The first version of her Sonnets from the Portuguese was published legitimately in 1850, and this was the poem, a very long poem indeed, that Wise and Forman got started with.”
“Ah-ha,” I said. “Every kid at my high school learned something from Sonnets from the Portuguese. There are forty-three sonnets, right?”
“Forty-four.”
“It’s the last one of the forty-four every school child learned.”
“Second last. And every kid at your high school probably remembered only the first two lines.”
“‘How do I love thee?’” I recited. “‘Let me count the ways….’”
My recital ran out of inspiration in a hurry.
“Ah-ha yourself, Crang,” Fletcher said, looking even more superior than usual. “That’s as far as you can go?”
I thought about punching Fletcher in the schnozz but settled for allowing him to get on with his tale of forgery among the Victorians.
“Wise and Forman — this was in 1894, many years after the first publication of Sonnets from the Portuguese — they printed a dozen copies of their booklet,” Fletcher said. “They used paper and type that looked authentically like something from much earlier. And they were careful about inventing a story to account for the poem’s re-emergence all those decades after it had been printed in, as they claimed, 1847, three years before the true first edition. It was a quite sophisticated apparatus Wise and Forman rigged, and it convinced all the scholars of the day.”
“Elizabeth Barrett Browning wasn’t around to object?”
Fletcher nodded. “She had died. So had everybody else who could have blown the whistle on the whole idea of an edition earlier than the real first edition.”
“Who eventually spotted the Wise and Forman version for a fake?” I said, entering notes into my iPhone. “And when?”
“A pair of young English booksellers named Carter and Pollard in 1934. These two had real science on their side. They worked typographical analysis of the typeface on the pages, chemical analysis of the paper, all of the science that proved the faked version of the poetry dated from much later than 1847.”
“Am I assuming correctly that Wise and Forman were no longer on the scene?”
“Forman had died years earlier, but Wise had the bad luck to keep on living for a few years after Carter and Pollard pulled the rug on him. The old fellow denied the forgeries to the end, even though it was shown that he and Forman had done the same thing with