Thomas Wise had been a book lover for as long as he could remember. When still a boy, he would take every penny of pocket money he had and buy books from the street vendors. When he grew older, he became a serious collector. His specialties were poetry and drama, and some of his volumes went all the way back to the Elizabethan era.
At the time, book collecting — and especially the collecting of first editions — was beginning to become a serious pastime in Victorian England. A “complete” first edition was a special prize, and a “complete” work was not necessarily one in the same condition as when published. It was common — and completely acceptable — to assemble a “first” out of multiple copies of the same book. For example, you might obtain three copies of a first edition of Sonnets from the Portuguese, all with various pages missing, and be able to assemble two complete works. Wise did this routinely. He usually kept the better edition for himself and sold the other to help finance his collection.
Besides selling duplicates of books that he found and purchased, or books he had assembled from incomplete copies, Wise also made money by working as an agent for other serious collectors. He acquired quite a reputation for himself and was honored in the field. He was given an honorary M.A. degree by the University of Oxford, and was made an honorary Fellow of Worcester College. Later on, he was elected President of the Bibliographical Society. Along the way, he amassed, not only a fantastic collection of works, but a considerable fortune.
Unfortunately, Wise didn’t content himself with merely discovering first editions of important works; sometimes he went to the extent of creating them. Some of the works he was responsible for were not just first editions, but pre-first editions. A pre-first edition was the publication of a work of literature, usually in pamphlet form, that predated all known first editions. Frequently, pre-firsts had been published for private distribution by the author. Such works actually existed. It was just that Wise began discovering a very large number of them — a suspiciously large number.
Wise had to make great efforts in order to pull off all these frauds. Not only did the item have to be printed in appropriate form (the printer probably was told it was a facsimile edition), but the work needed to be “discovered,” preferably by different people, and preferably not too many at a time. He wouldn’t discover too many of them himself, of course. Frequently, he pretended he was acting as an intermediary for an unknown seller. He mixed the forgeries in with lots of authentic works. He created bibliographies that included both genuine and spurious publications.
Wise hadn’t come up with this scheme himself. It had been invented by a man named Harry Buxton Forman. Like Wise, Forman was a bibliographer and collector. His specialties were Shelley and Keats, and he became quite an authority on the poets and their works. He had committed the same type of fraud, publishing a work under a false date and imprint. Unfortunately, Forman had chosen a relatively unknown poet to publish and, although the forgery was technically successful, he did not realize much profit from the forgery. It took Wise to figure out how to make the enterprise pay.
The two men worked together for some time, specializing in the works of the “modern” — that is, Victorian — poets. Some of the poets they “pre-published,” such as Swinburne and Rossetti, were actually still alive at the time. Forman later became ill, and wished to pull out of the enterprise, but he was in too deeply to extricate himself completely.
It all came tumbling down around them in 1934, when John Carter and Graham Pollard published their own work, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets. They had been suspicious of the large number of previously unknown publications that were turning up, especially since the origins of so many of them were so mysterious. They then proved the books forgeries scientifically.
It was known that, prior to 1861, books in England had been printed on paper made exclusively from rags. Paper made from wood pulp by the acid process had not come into being until 1874. Carter and Pollard were able to conclusively prove that 22 pamphlets had been printed on paper that had not been in existence at the time Wise claimed they were printed.
In addition, Carter and Pollard were able to trace some of the typefaces used and prove that they, too, were anachronistic. They didn’t accuse Wise directly of forgery, but merely of being naive in not recognizing the forgeries. Wise maintained his innocence until his death, although in his later years he completely retired from society and lived in seclusion.
In 1944, seven years after Wise’s death, a letter known as the Pforzheimer document was released to the public. It is a letter from Forman to Wise, complaining about being trapped into continuing a fraud. It is the only piece of evidence, even today, that conclusively links Wise and Forman to the forgeries.
After Wise’s death in 1937, his considerable private collection, known as the Ashley Library, was sold to the British Museum for ₤66,000. It contains 7,000 volumes, and is considered one of the foremost collections of 19th century literature. When the books were inventoried and compared to the Museum’s previous acquisitions, it was discovered that 200 book leaves were missing from the Museum’s copies, and that 89 of these pages had found their way into the Wise editions. (They can ascertain this by matching up stains and needle holes in the bindings.) When this was discovered, the University of Texas sent relevant copies of books in the collection they had acquired from Henry Wrenn, a friend of Wise’s and a prominent American collector. 60 of the books from the Wrenn Collection also had pages stolen from the British Museum. Thomas Wise had apparently been using the British Museum to augment his own — and his friend’s — “complete” editions.
Sources: Chase’s Calendar of Events, 2011 Edition: The Ultimate Go-To Guide for Special Days, Weeks, and Months, Editors of Chase’s Calendar of Events; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October 7; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_James_Wise; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Library; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Buxton_Forman; http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/forgery/wise.htm; http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,771994,00.html; http://www.forensicgenealogy.info/contest_299_results.html; http://skjanes.com/tjwisepaper.pdf; http://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1091&context=libassoc.