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The Book of Dragons (and the Con Artist Who Made It), with Rebecca Romney
85 Plays1 year ago
Rebecca Romney, co-founder of rare book dealer Type Punch Matrix and a frequent guest on Pawn Stars, returns to our podcast Curious Objects this week. She has with her a mid-nineteenth-century abecebestiary, or calligraphic treatment of the alphabet with animal motifs, made by Englishman Charles Eduard Stuart . . . except that wasn't really his name. Charles Manning Allen and his brother John, known as the Sobieski Stuarts, were eccentric book publishers who claimed to be descendants of Stuart claimant to the throne Bonnie Prince Charlie. Volumes produced by the pair such as Romney’s abecedary, what she describes as “Book of Kells meets M. C. Escher meets Game of Thrones,” and bogus guides to Scottish tartans and clans found a ready audience in romantic Victorian England.
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Transcript
Introduction to Curious Objects and Today's Topic
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:11
Speaker
This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
00:00:19
Speaker
Now, we have to start today with a philosophical question.
00:00:23
Speaker
Are you telling a lie if you believe it?
00:00:25
Speaker
Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it.
00:00:35
Speaker
Now, what if that lie is a claim to the throne of England?
00:00:39
Speaker
So today's curious object is absolutely bizarre and I love it.
00:00:44
Speaker
It's a rare book called an ABCdery.
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And I'm excited to tell you about what that is.
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But honestly, even if you already know all about ABCderies, you've probably never seen one like this.
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And it's going to lead us down a path full of dragons and forgeries and pretenders and con artists.
Rebecca Romney's Anecdote on Fake Signatures
00:01:02
Speaker
And returning to Curious Objects for the first time since 2018 to tell us all about this fabulous book is Rebecca Romney.
00:01:09
Speaker
She's the co-founder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare books firm based in Washington, D.C.
00:01:15
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And you might also know her as the rare books specialist on the History Channel show Pawn Stars.
00:01:20
Speaker
Rebecca, welcome back to the pod.
00:01:23
Speaker
I am so happy to be here.
00:01:24
Speaker
It's been a few years.
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Speaker
I have some rapid fire questions for you.
00:01:28
Speaker
Are you ready?
00:01:29
Speaker
Let's do it.
00:01:31
Speaker
What's the most convincing fake that you've ever caught?
00:01:35
Speaker
One that almost fooled you?
00:01:37
Speaker
There was one book I really wanted to be right.
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Speaker
And it looked so good when I first saw it because it was this Langston Hughes anthology inscribed to the Nobel laureate, Wally Soyinka.
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Speaker
And I thought you can get a better association for what this book was.
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Speaker
There are two just giants in 20th century literature.
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Speaker
And I was all ready just to buy it.
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Speaker
And then I said, no, no, no, I have to slow down and actually do my due diligence.
Understanding Rare Books and Misconceptions
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Speaker
Don't get too excited by the idea.
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Speaker
And the problem is Langston Hughes is a regularly forged signature.
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And I just could not get to the confidence of buying it.
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I thought it was wrong.
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Speaker
But that's really what you're most likely to get caught on, in my opinion.
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And there is this sort of philosophical question, which I'm sure we'll get into, is
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you know, is there such a thing as a successful forgery?
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Speaker
Because if it's a successful forgery, it's not called a forgery.
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On a scale of one to 10, how annoyed are you when people handle books with gloves on?
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Speaker
Very, very.
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The answer is very.
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I'm annoyed with that for a couple of reasons.
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One is because
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Speaker
it is actually more likely to damage the book.
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Speaker
But even from a personal perspective, the reason, of course, it bothers me is because I get yelled at all the time by people who watch TV and movies that see these white gloves and say, you're doing it wrong.
00:02:59
Speaker
And I say, who's the professional here?
00:03:01
Speaker
Okay.
00:03:02
Speaker
Aside from that, what's a misconception people have about rare books that you'd like to fix?
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Speaker
Well, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that rare has to equal old.
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Speaker
You can have a rare book from 1996.
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Speaker
It doesn't have to be from 1750.
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Another classic misconception is that rare books are all first editions.
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These are certain ways that people might collect, but fundamentally what book collecting is, is looking at books as historical artifacts.
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Speaker
They are representations, material vestiges of a particular time and place.
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And then from there, they have lived entire lives before they've reached your hands.
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And that's another history, another story in and of itself.
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And that's really what book collectors are seeking.
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And so things like first editions or age of book, those can be very interesting and appealing
Personal Connection to Ursula K. Le Guin's Work
00:03:59
Speaker
to people.
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But inherently, that's not what rare books and book collecting is about.
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Speaker
Now, there's a nuclear winter descending and you are heading down into the bunker.
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Speaker
But tragically, you only have room to bring one book with you.
00:04:14
Speaker
What do you choose?
00:04:14
Speaker
Oh, how dare you?
00:04:15
Speaker
How dare you?
00:04:18
Speaker
I'm not sure I would go down in the bunker in that.
00:04:21
Speaker
Oh, God.
00:04:21
Speaker
No, save yourself.
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Save at least yourself in one book.
00:04:27
Speaker
Boy, that is tough.
00:04:30
Speaker
For sentimental reasons, I might choose the first book that I actually bought to collect rather than to read.
00:04:42
Speaker
And that was a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin's Tales from Earthsea that was the...
00:04:48
Speaker
owned by her agent Virginia Kidd, who was instrumental in growing Le Guin's career from the pulp paperback, science fiction publishing side into hardcover literary slash more mainstream reputation that it enjoys today, that her work enjoys today.
00:05:13
Speaker
Yeah.
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And that also has the advantage of being a good read.
00:05:17
Speaker
Exactly.
00:05:18
Speaker
I mean, I'm always happy to return to Le Guin if I'm, I've used Le Guin as a number on a number of occasions just as a, I don't have anything else that I know that I want to do right now.
00:05:28
Speaker
Or here's, actually, I'll give you a great example.
00:05:31
Speaker
Yeah, there was a time when I was getting addicted to a video game.
00:05:35
Speaker
I was playing Assassin's Creed.
00:05:37
Speaker
And you're not the first Curious Objects guest to mention that addiction.
00:05:41
Speaker
Oh, really?
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:43
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Well, in most Assassin's Creed games up until this point, this is Odyssey, the ancient Greece one.
00:05:49
Speaker
They were relatively short and you can finish them pretty quickly.
00:05:51
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But Odyssey is huge open world.
00:05:53
Speaker
You can play it for hundreds of hours.
00:05:54
Speaker
So I was getting addicted to it and I could not stop playing it.
00:05:57
Speaker
I was like, I don't want to make dinner.
00:05:59
Speaker
I don't want to go to sleep.
00:05:59
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I just want to play this game.
00:06:01
Speaker
And I thought, this is not good.
00:06:03
Speaker
So I use Le Guin as replacement therapy.
00:06:05
Speaker
Every single time I wanted to play Assassin's Creed, I would pick up a Le Guin book because it was the only thing that I wanted to do as much as play Assassin's Creed until finally the impulse
Curiosity and the Role of a Rare Book Dealer
00:06:15
Speaker
went away.
00:06:15
Speaker
I went through like seven Le Guin books before it did.
00:06:18
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Incredible.
00:06:20
Speaker
Okay.
00:06:21
Speaker
So you wake up one morning and much to your surprise, you realize that you're just not interested in books anymore.
00:06:28
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So what field are you going to go into instead?
00:06:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:32
Speaker
in books anymore.
00:06:34
Speaker
Sorry, that's very funny.
00:06:37
Speaker
Well, I will say that one of the reasons that being a rare book dealer has been so perfect for me is because I am very curious as a basic personality trait, which is to say, whatever book you put in front of me, whether it is an important work of economics or a mystery or a work of Scottish history, my first impulse is to say, ooh, what is that?
Advice for Aspiring Book Collectors
00:07:03
Speaker
And so, I'm not sure that I would wilt in a different career, but the reason I like this career is because it allows me to be a kind of generalist and to explore whatever I have the opportunity to.
00:07:18
Speaker
It just allows me to spend my day going down rabbit holes.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:07:23
Speaker
Well, that's a little bit of a hedging answer, but I'll give it to you.
00:07:25
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:07:27
Speaker
So, okay, for someone who is still interested in books, but maybe just getting started in a field, what's a book that you would recommend for them to read?
00:07:36
Speaker
Oh, yes.
00:07:37
Speaker
First book you should get if you're looking into book collecting, even as a collector, let alone as a dealer, is John Carter's ABC for Book Collectors.
00:07:45
Speaker
Because there's a lot of jargon in the verb book world.
00:07:49
Speaker
And these terms have very specific meanings and they are still used across the board, across auction catalogs, dealer descriptions.
00:07:57
Speaker
When you're going to a book fair, these terms are bandied about all the time.
00:08:02
Speaker
So to get your foundation in the field, you need to learn the terms.
00:08:07
Speaker
And Carter's ABC is not a perfect book for this because Carter has a funny way of writing.
00:08:13
Speaker
His personality really comes
Learning from Professional Mistakes
00:08:15
Speaker
out.
00:08:15
Speaker
And I often joke that he writes as if he were translating his own
00:08:20
Speaker
words from Latin into English.
00:08:23
Speaker
Very bizarre style.
00:08:25
Speaker
But this part of the personality also is, I think, a pretty solid introduction to what the rare book world is like.
00:08:31
Speaker
Fair enough.
00:08:33
Speaker
What is a mistake that you've made in your professional life that perhaps has taught you something?
00:08:40
Speaker
So a mistake that I made that comes to mind right now is something that I had to sort of pivot from after I made it.
00:08:48
Speaker
I had purchased a book, I think this was at a book fair, and at the time I had never seen it before and I just thought it was so interesting and the due diligence that I had done on it, I felt like, oh, there's definitely room here for me to make a profit.
00:09:05
Speaker
And then I get home and I actually have more resources to check, you know, prices realized, that type of thing, and other dealer catalogs.
00:09:14
Speaker
And I realized, nope, I paid pretty much retail for this book.
00:09:18
Speaker
There's no room for profit on this.
00:09:22
Speaker
And that happens, you know.
00:09:24
Speaker
And so my choice was I could either just stubbornly mark it up and see if I could sell it.
00:09:29
Speaker
But I thought that's not going to get me anywhere.
00:09:32
Speaker
And so, you know, I sold it at the price that I paid for it, or at least I listed that.
00:09:37
Speaker
And I sold it last week, which is why I'm saying this, is I felt like to me that was the win of I made this mistake.
00:09:44
Speaker
And instead of stubbornly holding on to it, I just said, you know what, that was a mistake.
Engaging with the Podcast Community
00:09:48
Speaker
We're going to treat it as such.
00:09:50
Speaker
We're going to move on.
00:09:50
Speaker
And that in and of itself is my win.
00:09:56
Speaker
We'll be right back with Rebecca Romney and this mysterious ABCD.
00:10:01
Speaker
If you'd like to see pictures of it, and it really is a beautiful object, not just a curious one, you can always go to themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
00:10:11
Speaker
You can also, if you like what you're hearing, support curious objects by leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts.
00:10:17
Speaker
One recent reviewer wrote,
00:10:19
Speaker
articulate, likable host and fascinating guests.
00:10:23
Speaker
And wow, now I'm blushing.
00:10:24
Speaker
But these reviews honestly are a huge help in bringing new listeners to Curious Objects.
The ABCdery and the Sobieski Stuarts' Legacy
00:10:29
Speaker
And more listeners means more opportunities for me to talk with the experts and connoisseurs you love hearing from.
00:10:34
Speaker
So if you haven't done it already, I'd be delighted to see your review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening.
00:10:43
Speaker
And of course, I would also love to hear from you directly via email.
00:10:47
Speaker
at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:10:57
Speaker
Rebecca, the book you've picked out for us today is so intriguing, but I have to start with a really basic question.
00:11:05
Speaker
What is an ABC-dery?
00:11:08
Speaker
And ABC Dury is, this is a Carter question, actually.
00:11:11
Speaker
You can look this up in Carter's ABC for Book Collectors.
00:11:14
Speaker
That's fantastic.
00:11:15
Speaker
And it's actually thematic for the title of that book.
00:11:18
Speaker
Yes, yes, indeed.
00:11:19
Speaker
So an ABC theory is essentially a full listing of the alphabet.
00:11:24
Speaker
And this has a long history.
00:11:26
Speaker
I mean, you see this on ancient monuments, for example.
00:11:29
Speaker
And ABC theories can get more complicated.
00:11:32
Speaker
You know, you can turn them into verses or illustrations.
00:11:35
Speaker
But the basic idea is that you are presenting the entire alphabet in the case of English, A through Z.
00:11:43
Speaker
And the one we're talking about today was created in 1842 by an Englishman named Charles Edward, except that wasn't really his name.
00:11:52
Speaker
But we'll get into that later.
00:11:54
Speaker
First, just tell me what this book actually looks like.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yes, so this book is fairly large.
00:12:01
Speaker
It's about 16 inches high, and it's bound in this incredible full Morocco binding with this gilt Scottish coat of arms on the boards.
00:12:11
Speaker
And then inside, it's entirely in manuscript.
00:12:16
Speaker
And each letter of the alphabet is created through a labyrinth of serpentine dragon-like shapes.
00:12:27
Speaker
And to me, when I first saw it, it's high Gothic revival, right?
00:12:33
Speaker
But to me, when I looked at it, it felt like this combination of the Book of Kells meets M.C.
00:12:40
Speaker
Escher meets Game of Thrones.
00:12:42
Speaker
That's what I thought when I saw this, because the imagination and the beauty of it is really striking while also having those
00:12:52
Speaker
sort of impulses that you see in the Victorian era of gothic influence, horror vacui, all of those arts and trends kind of coming together in the form of an ABC.
00:13:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:04
Speaker
So tell me a little more about these dragons.
00:13:07
Speaker
Yeah, the dragons, I think, are trying to really tie into what
The Vestiarium Scoticum Forgery Exposed
00:13:13
Speaker
the author here is seeing as something ancient.
00:13:17
Speaker
You know, the Book of Kells is a good example of this.
00:13:19
Speaker
They're looking at medieval sources and earlier, and in the 19th century, you see this big antiquarian impulse of trying to form and understand national histories through the
00:13:32
Speaker
what has been left of the past.
00:13:34
Speaker
Often that's monuments or manuscripts, art.
00:13:38
Speaker
And so the dragons that you're seeing here are specifically antiquarian in perspective.
00:13:44
Speaker
It's capturing all of those trends, pulling it.
00:13:47
Speaker
But it's kind of like, you think about the 1950s retrofuturism
00:13:52
Speaker
Right.
00:13:53
Speaker
Where in the post-war period, there's all this optimism and everyone's imagining like the Jetsons, what the world is going to be like in the future.
00:13:59
Speaker
And now we look back at that and we see it as quaint and particularly a flavor of the 50s.
00:14:05
Speaker
That's kind of what's happening here, which is that this moment is pulling from particularly medieval traditions to try to make it seem odd.
00:14:16
Speaker
modern, these modern coherent movements of who the Scots are, what the history of Scotland is, what it means to be Scottish.
00:14:23
Speaker
And now we look back at it and we say, wow, that's so Victorian.
00:14:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:27
Speaker
Okay.
00:14:27
Speaker
So I'm glad you mentioned Scotland because we need to talk a little bit about why this book was created and the context for it.
00:14:35
Speaker
And so we have to back up for a moment and talk about this guy, Charles.
00:14:40
Speaker
So he and his brother, James, were known as the Sobieski Stuarts, if I'm saying that right.
00:14:46
Speaker
There's a lot of mystery around them.
00:14:49
Speaker
And in fact, they both went by various different names.
00:14:53
Speaker
Why was that?
00:14:55
Speaker
Yes.
00:14:56
Speaker
Well, the why, I think some people could dispute.
00:15:01
Speaker
Well, at least they would dispute, perhaps.
00:15:02
Speaker
Uh-huh.
00:15:04
Speaker
I'm not sure it's so disputable anymore.
00:15:07
Speaker
Essentially, they're given names.
00:15:10
Speaker
They were the Allens.
00:15:12
Speaker
They were born in Wales, and they were actually English.
00:15:17
Speaker
And they ended up in Scotland in the 1820s when they started going by eventually the names of the Stuart and Sobieski Stuart as a relation, as a way to...
00:15:30
Speaker
connect to their supposed ancestry that they were putting forth, which was that they were
00:15:35
Speaker
the grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the sort of last claimant to the Stuart throne.
00:15:43
Speaker
You know, he in the 18th century actually lands in Scotland and the Scottish support him.
00:15:48
Speaker
And of course, you have the Battle of Culloden essentially ends his claims when he and his backers lose.
00:15:57
Speaker
And the reason that this is so important is because it's very tied to Scottish patriotism.
00:16:03
Speaker
The tartans that we think about today, the Scottish tartans, those were associated with Highlanders, Highlander wares.
00:16:11
Speaker
You didn't see them so much in the Lowlanders.
00:16:13
Speaker
And in the period of Bonnie Prince Charlie, they started being associated with these revolutionaries who were trying to put Bonnie Prince Charlie back on the throne.
00:16:21
Speaker
And so when his claim failed, when they lost in battle,
00:16:27
Speaker
Certain types of those tartans were then banned by the British government.
00:16:32
Speaker
And then that creates a sort of reactive patriotism centered around these ideas of Scottish tartans and the lost histories of Scottish clans.
00:16:41
Speaker
And that is a really important context for these brothers, Charles and James, who come in, start saying that they are the grandsons, the legitimate...
00:16:50
Speaker
like the heirs essentially of the Stuart dynasty.
00:16:54
Speaker
And one of the things that they really latch onto is the Scottish tartan as a symbol of Scotland's history and culture apart from England.
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Speaker
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00:17:36
Speaker
So did they have any evidence actually to support these claims that they had royal blood?
00:17:42
Speaker
Not really.
00:17:43
Speaker
Okay.
00:17:45
Speaker
So it was really just a sort of, you know, some combination of hope and deception.
00:17:53
Speaker
Yes, they were very cultured.
00:17:56
Speaker
They were very educated and they were very genteel in their manners.
00:18:01
Speaker
So they were impressive to people.
00:18:04
Speaker
And part of what they did initially is they would kind of only do this through implication.
00:18:10
Speaker
They weren't necessarily immediately outright saying this.
00:18:13
Speaker
They would just take on the name.
00:18:14
Speaker
Oh, you know, Stuart.
00:18:17
Speaker
And...
00:18:19
Speaker
One of the reasons for a long time, people could kind of decide either way, oh, well, that's silly or, well, that's kind of really interesting.
00:18:27
Speaker
You know, the lost steward throne, we all kind of regret that things happen the way they did.
00:18:31
Speaker
And there's something very compelling about the legend of that.
00:18:35
Speaker
And so for a while, that just seemed very innocuous.
00:18:39
Speaker
It didn't seem like it hurt anyone for these people to go around and make those claims that nothing's happening.
00:18:45
Speaker
But then in the 1840s, they published a book of Scottish Tarments.
00:18:52
Speaker
And this book was supposedly based on a lost manuscript that they had because of this royal ancestry that they had gotten from their father, who had gotten it, of course, through descent through Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Cultural Impact of the Sobieski Stuarts' Forgery
00:19:06
Speaker
And so the very provenance of this manuscript that they were putting forth for publication was tied to their claims.
00:19:14
Speaker
And then when that manuscript comes out and people start disputing it and saying it is a forgery, then that is directly related to, well, their claims are also bogus.
00:19:26
Speaker
Right.
00:19:27
Speaker
So they might have overreached a little in pushing this.
00:19:31
Speaker
And so the manuscript is called the Vestiarium Scoticum, which is very, very fancy Latin title.
00:19:38
Speaker
But it just means that basically it's a book about Scottish dress, right?
00:19:43
Speaker
Yes, yes.
00:19:44
Speaker
It's just Scottish dress.
00:19:46
Speaker
And there was one scholar who called it something like the most controversial costume book ever published.
00:19:53
Speaker
Wow.
00:19:54
Speaker
Which, yeah, I don't, that sounds to me like it's maybe setting a low bar, but I don't know that much about costume books.
00:20:00
Speaker
Maybe there's a lot of controversy in that field.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, I do, I kind of love the sort of both esteem and shade that that statement implies.
00:20:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:10
Speaker
Well, yeah.
00:20:11
Speaker
And I saw there was another historian who said that it was shot through with pure fantasy and barefaced forgery.
00:20:20
Speaker
So really not mincing words there.
00:20:24
Speaker
No.
00:20:26
Speaker
So was that, I mean, was that criticism justified?
00:20:30
Speaker
Pretty much.
00:20:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:31
Speaker
I mean, that's pretty well established by scholars today.
00:20:36
Speaker
Even when they were first sort of, quote unquote, circulating this manuscript, they first showed it to a man named Sir Thomas de Glouder in 1829 or so.
00:20:46
Speaker
And they said they described this manuscript that they had that had been passed down through their ancestry.
00:20:51
Speaker
And he was totally taken in by it and super excited about it.
00:20:56
Speaker
And from the very beginning, as soon as they start talking about it, some people like Lauder are interested and others are immediately questioning it.
00:21:05
Speaker
And an example of someone who immediately questioned it was Sir Thomas's friend, Walter Scott.
00:21:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:21:11
Speaker
So Sir Thomas writes to Walter Scott and says, isn't this amazing?
00:21:15
Speaker
And Scott says, you know, I would perhaps...
00:21:19
Speaker
maybe take a step back from this because I'm not sure that this is right.
00:21:23
Speaker
And one of the main things that Scott, Scott was an antiquarian himself.
00:21:26
Speaker
He was really careful about his sources.
00:21:29
Speaker
He wrote a lot about Scottish history, not only of course in his fictions, but his fictions were the worlds that he was creating in there were informed by all of the antiquarian work that he did.
00:21:41
Speaker
And he was one of the people who had studied enough about Tartans to know that this idea that every Tartan is a specific one that goes with one particular clan, that that was actually a sort of modern creation.
Gothic Revival and Philosophical Themes of the ABCdery
00:21:57
Speaker
So for Scott, he immediately said, I really don't think that this is how Tartans work.
00:22:03
Speaker
And there are a number of signs in this that I just feel that this is wrong.
00:22:07
Speaker
And there's this moment early on when
00:22:10
Speaker
Sir Thomas, he says, okay, well, let's take it to the British Museum and they can look at it.
00:22:15
Speaker
And then suddenly James comes up with this letter from his father that says, oh, you're not supposed to tell anyone about that manuscript.
00:22:24
Speaker
It's from our family.
00:22:26
Speaker
Oh, no.
00:22:28
Speaker
And conveniently, they say, oh, I guess we can't talk to the experts of the British Museum.
00:22:36
Speaker
But time goes on, they keep on living their sort of genteel romantic exiles, descendants of royal's life.
00:22:48
Speaker
And in the 40s, they actually do publish what they call essentially the printed version of their lost manuscript.
00:22:58
Speaker
And that book, Vestiarum at Scotacombe, that actually came out the same year.
00:23:05
Speaker
as this manuscript was produced in 1842.
00:23:08
Speaker
Yeah, so this is super interesting to me.
00:23:11
Speaker
And I, you know, I just want to say, it seems a little funny to me, like, I think about intentional forgeries in the antiques world as being a phenomenon that really comes into its own later in the 19th century, you know, as the great collectors like Morgan and Rockefeller are starting to buy things up, and there's suddenly a huge market for these
00:23:34
Speaker
antiques and antiquities.
00:23:35
Speaker
And so, you know, unscrupulous individuals try to fill that demand however they can.
00:23:42
Speaker
But this is a couple of generations before that.
00:23:45
Speaker
And, you know, the forgery of this bestiarum scotticum is
00:23:51
Speaker
You know, that is tied to a much larger con artist project that Charles and James are engaged in.
00:23:59
Speaker
So it's just quite interesting to me that they're sort of ahead of the curve vis-a-vis antiques forging.
00:24:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think when you talk about it in the marketplace sense, I think you're right.
00:24:10
Speaker
It really took the coherence of this modern marketplace to get the type of forgeries or the motivations for forgeries that we see today.
00:24:19
Speaker
But in fact, the Allens, the Sobieski-Stewards, were working in sort of older traditions of forgery.
00:24:26
Speaker
You might do it for other reasons.
00:24:28
Speaker
So a good example of this is the poems of Ossian.
00:24:33
Speaker
I'm not sure if you're familiar with these.
00:24:34
Speaker
This is from the 18th century.
00:24:35
Speaker
This poem
00:24:36
Speaker
Scottish poet James MacPherson published the poems of Ossian.
00:24:40
Speaker
He claimed that these were ancient sources and that he had just sort of translated them from old or Scottish Gaelic.
00:24:48
Speaker
And it made a huge impact.
00:24:50
Speaker
And of course, that was a forgery.
00:24:53
Speaker
It was a modern creation.
00:24:54
Speaker
Yeah, wow.
00:24:56
Speaker
And that is an example of the type of sort of charlatanry, confidence man, literary forgery connection that they were actually kind of modeling themselves on.
Collecting the ABCdery: Aesthetic and Historical Appeal
00:25:13
Speaker
And you can see it's often tied to, you know, that idea of what people want to believe.
00:25:18
Speaker
They want to believe in this great Scottish Gaelic tradition of these amazing poems and how that actually would
00:25:26
Speaker
tie really into the burgeoning romantic movement, the Gaelic revival, all of that.
00:25:32
Speaker
It's trying to essentially patch the wave that's already happening culturally, not necessarily to sell a single manuscript for big bucks, but in order to build one's reputation and create an entire persona that brings you success.
00:25:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:53
Speaker
So, okay.
00:25:55
Speaker
It's 1842.
00:25:55
Speaker
They published it.
00:25:56
Speaker
They finally published this book on Scottish dress, but this is the very same year as you mentioned that Charles presents this ABCDery as a gift.
00:26:07
Speaker
So what was the context around that?
00:26:09
Speaker
Who, who, why did he make it at this time and who was he making it for?
00:26:14
Speaker
Yeah, I know he was making it for.
00:26:17
Speaker
He was making it for Sir Thomas de Glouder, who, as we said earlier, he was one of their earliest champions.
00:26:23
Speaker
He's the one who was trying to convince Scott that their manuscript was real and correct.
00:26:31
Speaker
And this was presented as a gift to him the year that their first book about Scottish chargons comes out.
00:26:38
Speaker
And my surmise is that he did this in order to essentially thank him for his support.
00:26:44
Speaker
He had at this point been supporting them nearly 15 years against all of their naysayers.
00:26:50
Speaker
And so that is my surmise.
00:26:51
Speaker
I don't know that.
00:26:52
Speaker
All I know is that this was signed to Charles Edward and it was presented to Sir Tom Stiglatter who had long supported them.
00:26:59
Speaker
And then one other thing that's kind of interesting is that in 1845, they publish another book about Scottish dress, Costume of the Clans.
00:27:08
Speaker
And the interesting thing about these sort of serpentine letters and ornaments in this manuscript is
00:27:16
Speaker
And this was pointed out to me by Craig Buchanan, who is the Sobiesti Stuart authority.
00:27:22
Speaker
The title page and a lot of the ornaments in the 1845 book Costume of the Clans are in the same style as this manuscript.
00:27:31
Speaker
So there's a sense that, you know, Sir Thomas was supporting their literary ambitions and their publication of these manuscripts.
00:27:37
Speaker
And here is Charles Edward giving him one of the original manuscripts that's sort of tied to these other works.
00:27:44
Speaker
Fascinating.
00:27:46
Speaker
So what do you know about what happened in the book after 1842?
00:27:52
Speaker
I don't know anything almost.
00:27:54
Speaker
In fact, all I know is we got it from a dealer in the UK a few years back and I have no idea where it's been.
00:28:02
Speaker
There's no signs of provenance except the original ones of the presentation on
00:28:07
Speaker
Sir Charles Edward, his signature, as well as the gift specifically to Sir Thomas.
00:28:16
Speaker
And that's it.
00:28:17
Speaker
And this is something that just kills me about books as opposed to a number of other fields where provenance is always very carefully traced.
00:28:27
Speaker
In the book world, these books can live many lives and pass many hands without any
00:28:33
Speaker
known sign of who those owners were.
00:28:36
Speaker
There's not necessarily a chain of provenance.
00:28:37
Speaker
You see it sometimes, you know, your family Bibles, for example, that's often where people will record births and deaths and who gets the book at different generations.
00:28:46
Speaker
But that's the exception that kind of pulls the rule that most folks pass hands very quietly across generations.
00:28:53
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:28:54
Speaker
It's fascinating.
00:28:54
Speaker
And so it hasn't been on the market before.
00:28:56
Speaker
It hasn't gone through auction houses or dealers, that sort of thing.
00:29:00
Speaker
It's just been floating around in the ether somewhere.
00:29:04
Speaker
Well, here's the thing.
00:29:05
Speaker
Maybe it has, but not properly identified.
00:29:08
Speaker
So when we first got this, we were cataloging it pretty much from this perspective of this is high Gothic revival.
00:29:18
Speaker
These are incredibly beautiful letter forms, and we're attracted to it as like an aesthetic object.
00:29:25
Speaker
And then because it was Scottish, it has a Scottish coat of arms in the front and we had that provenance.
00:29:31
Speaker
I actually ran it by one of the very famous sort of authorities on Scottish collecting and that's Bill Zacks.
00:29:39
Speaker
And I said, hey, what do you think of this?
00:29:41
Speaker
Have you seen anything like this?
00:29:43
Speaker
And he wrote back and he said, this is very interesting.
00:29:45
Speaker
Did you realize that the Charles Edward here is Charles Stuart Edward, one of the Sobieski-Stewart brothers?
00:29:53
Speaker
And I said...
00:29:55
Speaker
No, Bill.
00:29:56
Speaker
Thank you.
00:29:58
Speaker
And that is the thing that then unfolded this entire story.
00:30:03
Speaker
So it initially started as this gut, I love this.
00:30:07
Speaker
And then as I'm going through and doing the due diligence, we reach out to Bill Zaks, we reach out to a specialist.
00:30:13
Speaker
He gives us another thread to pull.
00:30:15
Speaker
That's how we get in contact with someone like I mentioned, Craig Buchanan, who
00:30:19
Speaker
is the main authority on Sobieski stewards.
00:30:21
Speaker
And then you get this entire story that is just sort of slumbering in this manuscript.
00:30:28
Speaker
I mean, maybe it was on the market 40 years ago, but not identified as the Sobieski stewards manuscript.
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:34
Speaker
Interesting.
00:30:36
Speaker
How did things turn out for the Sobieski stewards, by the way?
00:30:40
Speaker
Well, they essentially lived the rest of their lives making this argument that they were indeed part of that dynasty.
00:30:48
Speaker
To the end of their lives, they did that.
00:30:49
Speaker
That sounds exhausting.
00:30:50
Speaker
I know.
00:30:51
Speaker
But I mean, I feel like if you're going to be a con man, you really do have to commit to the bit.
00:30:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:59
Speaker
I mean, you do have to wonder at a certain point whether they had convinced themselves.
00:31:03
Speaker
Once you live it for so long, you do wonder.
00:31:06
Speaker
I do think Sir Thomas was convinced.
00:31:09
Speaker
That seems to be the case.
00:31:11
Speaker
But, you know, it is fairly clear that the manuscripts that they were creating were forgeries.
00:31:18
Speaker
And when you were actively creating that material, at some point you have to say, am I making reality?
00:31:23
Speaker
Or am I just mirroring it in this sort of... It is almost a joke on reality.
00:31:31
Speaker
Right.
00:31:31
Speaker
You know?
00:31:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:33
Speaker
You're trying to reshape reality even while you know it's not reality.
00:31:38
Speaker
Gosh, fascinating.
00:31:40
Speaker
So what do you think might motivate a collector to want to add this manuscript to their collection?
00:31:47
Speaker
Well, one thing I like about this book is that there are a lot of ways into it.
00:31:53
Speaker
So my initial gut for it was just on an aesthetic basis.
00:31:59
Speaker
Just visually, it blew me away, and that was good enough for me.
00:32:02
Speaker
And then the rest followed, right?
00:32:05
Speaker
And so I think that if you are into the Gothic revival, if you really love the Book of Kells, for example, something like this is going to be very, very appealing to you on that basis alone.
00:32:18
Speaker
But also it is, as we talked about, tied into the entire sort of Scottish patriotic movement of creating, in retrospect, a cultural history of tartans.
00:32:31
Speaker
And today we take a lot of this for granted.
00:32:33
Speaker
We associate, you know, major events often, you know, the Scottish tartans will be worn and will be worn according to Klan, which was all a 19th century creation.
00:32:44
Speaker
And this all ties into that.
00:32:47
Speaker
And so I think if you're interested in Scottish culture, Scottish history, if that's something that either through your own ancestry or your own studies, or whatever is appealing to you, that this is a really beautiful and fascinating object that is directly related to the creation of that in the 19th century.
00:33:07
Speaker
And then the other way that I would entirely pitch this to someone is someone who is interested in exactly these philosophical ideas we've been talking about.
00:33:16
Speaker
What makes something real?
00:33:18
Speaker
What is a point where you believe something or you can get people to believe something versus what is actually true in the absence of evidence?
00:33:27
Speaker
How much can you kind of push that?
00:33:30
Speaker
you know, and see what can get people believe.
00:33:32
Speaker
So studying forgery, studying con men, if you're interested in that, which I know a few people who are, that this is a particularly rich case study.
00:33:43
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:33:44
Speaker
Well, Rebecca Romney, thank you so much for joining me and for sharing this wonderful book with us.
00:33:51
Speaker
Thank you.
00:33:51
Speaker
As you can see, this book, I love talking about it.
00:33:55
Speaker
And as much as possible, I just want people to see it because I think that they will experience the same thing that I did when I saw it, which is just this impact of wow.
00:34:06
Speaker
Well, again, listeners, you can see images of this at the magazineantiques.com slash podcast.
00:34:12
Speaker
You can, of course, also see it at Type Punch Matrix, Rebecca's website, and best of luck selling it.
00:34:20
Speaker
Thank you, Ben.
00:34:20
Speaker
What a pleasure.
00:34:23
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
00:34:29
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
00:34:33
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit and I'm Ben Miller.
00:34:55
Speaker
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