Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
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.
Speaker: Now, we have to start today with a philosophical question.
Speaker: Are you telling a lie if you believe it?
Speaker: Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it.
Speaker: Now, what if that lie is a claim to the throne of England?
Speaker: So today's curious object is absolutely bizarre and I love it.
Speaker: It's a rare book called an ABCdery.
Speaker: And I'm excited to tell you about what that is.
Speaker: But honestly, even if you already know all about ABCderies, you've probably never seen one like this.
Speaker: And it's going to lead us down a path full of dragons and forgeries and pretenders and con artists.
Speaker: And returning to Curious Objects for the first time since 2018 to tell us all about this fabulous book is Rebecca Romney.
Speaker: She's the co-founder of Type Punch Matrix, a rare books firm based in Washington, D.C.
Speaker: And you might also know her as the rare books specialist on the History Channel show Pawn Stars.
Speaker: Rebecca, welcome back to the pod.
Speaker: I am so happy to be here.
Speaker: It's been a few years.
Speaker: I have some rapid fire questions for you.
Speaker: Are you ready?
Speaker: Let's do it.
Speaker: What's the most convincing fake that you've ever caught?
Speaker: One that almost fooled you?
Speaker: There was one book I really wanted to be right.
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.
Speaker: And I thought you can get a better association for what this book was.
Speaker: There are two just giants in 20th century literature.
Speaker: And I was all ready just to buy it.
Speaker: And then I said, no, no, no, I have to slow down and actually do my due diligence.
Speaker: Don't get too excited by the idea.
Speaker: And the problem is Langston Hughes is a regularly forged signature.
Speaker: And I just could not get to the confidence of buying it.
Speaker: I thought it was wrong.
Speaker: But that's really what you're most likely to get caught on, in my opinion.
Speaker: And there is this sort of philosophical question, which I'm sure we'll get into, is
Speaker: you know, is there such a thing as a successful forgery?
Speaker: Because if it's a successful forgery, it's not called a forgery.
Speaker: On a scale of one to 10, how annoyed are you when people handle books with gloves on?
Speaker: Very, very.
Speaker: The answer is very.
Speaker: I'm annoyed with that for a couple of reasons.
Speaker: One is because
Speaker: it is actually more likely to damage the book.
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.
Speaker: And I say, who's the professional here?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Aside from that, what's a misconception people have about rare books that you'd like to fix?
Speaker: Well, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that rare has to equal old.
Speaker: You can have a rare book from 1996.
Speaker: It doesn't have to be from 1750.
Speaker: Another classic misconception is that rare books are all first editions.
Speaker: These are certain ways that people might collect, but fundamentally what book collecting is, is looking at books as historical artifacts.
Speaker: They are representations, material vestiges of a particular time and place.
Speaker: And then from there, they have lived entire lives before they've reached your hands.
Speaker: And that's another history, another story in and of itself.
Speaker: And that's really what book collectors are seeking.
Speaker: And so things like first editions or age of book, those can be very interesting and appealing to people.
Speaker: But inherently, that's not what rare books and book collecting is about.
Speaker: Now, there's a nuclear winter descending and you are heading down into the bunker.
Speaker: But tragically, you only have room to bring one book with you.
Speaker: What do you choose?
Speaker: Oh, how dare you?
Speaker: How dare you?
Speaker: I'm not sure I would go down in the bunker in that.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: No, save yourself.
Speaker: Save at least yourself in one book.
Speaker: Boy, that is tough.
Speaker: For sentimental reasons, I might choose the first book that I actually bought to collect rather than to read.
Speaker: And that was a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin's Tales from Earthsea that was the...
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that also has the advantage of being a good read.
Speaker: Exactly.
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.
Speaker: Or here's, actually, I'll give you a great example.
Speaker: Yeah, there was a time when I was getting addicted to a video game.
Speaker: I was playing Assassin's Creed.
Speaker: And you're not the first Curious Objects guest to mention that addiction.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, in most Assassin's Creed games up until this point, this is Odyssey, the ancient Greece one.
Speaker: They were relatively short and you can finish them pretty quickly.
Speaker: But Odyssey is huge open world.
Speaker: You can play it for hundreds of hours.
Speaker: So I was getting addicted to it and I could not stop playing it.
Speaker: I was like, I don't want to make dinner.
Speaker: I don't want to go to sleep.
Speaker: I just want to play this game.
Speaker: And I thought, this is not good.
Speaker: So I use Le Guin as replacement therapy.
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 went away.
Speaker: I went through like seven Le Guin books before it did.
Speaker: Incredible.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So you wake up one morning and much to your surprise, you realize that you're just not interested in books anymore.
Speaker: So what field are you going to go into instead?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: in books anymore.
Speaker: Sorry, that's very funny.
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?
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.
Speaker: It just allows me to spend my day going down rabbit holes.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Well, that's a little bit of a hedging answer, but I'll give it to you.
Speaker: Absolutely.
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?
Speaker: Oh, yes.
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.
Speaker: Because there's a lot of jargon in the verb book world.
Speaker: And these terms have very specific meanings and they are still used across the board, across auction catalogs, dealer descriptions.
Speaker: When you're going to a book fair, these terms are bandied about all the time.
Speaker: So to get your foundation in the field, you need to learn the terms.
Speaker: And Carter's ABC is not a perfect book for this because Carter has a funny way of writing.
Speaker: His personality really comes out.
Speaker: And I often joke that he writes as if he were translating his own
Speaker: words from Latin into English.
Speaker: Very bizarre style.
Speaker: But this part of the personality also is, I think, a pretty solid introduction to what the rare book world is like.
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: What is a mistake that you've made in your professional life that perhaps has taught you something?
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: And I realized, nope, I paid pretty much retail for this book.
Speaker: There's no room for profit on this.
Speaker: And that happens, you know.
Speaker: And so my choice was I could either just stubbornly mark it up and see if I could sell it.
Speaker: But I thought that's not going to get me anywhere.
Speaker: And so, you know, I sold it at the price that I paid for it, or at least I listed that.
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.
Speaker: And instead of stubbornly holding on to it, I just said, you know what, that was a mistake.
Speaker: We're going to treat it as such.
Speaker: We're going to move on.
Speaker: And that in and of itself is my win.
Speaker: We'll be right back with Rebecca Romney and this mysterious ABCD.
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.
Speaker: You can also, if you like what you're hearing, support curious objects by leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker: One recent reviewer wrote,
Speaker: articulate, likable host and fascinating guests.
Speaker: And wow, now I'm blushing.
Speaker: But these reviews honestly are a huge help in bringing new listeners to Curious Objects.
Speaker: And more listeners means more opportunities for me to talk with the experts and connoisseurs you love hearing from.
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.
Speaker: And of course, I would also love to hear from you directly via email.
Speaker: at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: Rebecca, the book you've picked out for us today is so intriguing, but I have to start with a really basic question.
Speaker: What is an ABC-dery?
Speaker: And ABC Dury is, this is a Carter question, actually.
Speaker: You can look this up in Carter's ABC for Book Collectors.
Speaker: That's fantastic.
Speaker: And it's actually thematic for the title of that book.
Speaker: Yes, yes, indeed.
Speaker: So an ABC theory is essentially a full listing of the alphabet.
Speaker: And this has a long history.
Speaker: I mean, you see this on ancient monuments, for example.
Speaker: And ABC theories can get more complicated.
Speaker: You know, you can turn them into verses or illustrations.
Speaker: But the basic idea is that you are presenting the entire alphabet in the case of English, A through Z.
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.
Speaker: But we'll get into that later.
Speaker: First, just tell me what this book actually looks like.
Speaker: Yes, so this book is fairly large.
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.
Speaker: And then inside, it's entirely in manuscript.
Speaker: And each letter of the alphabet is created through a labyrinth of serpentine dragon-like shapes.
Speaker: And to me, when I first saw it, it's high Gothic revival, right?
Speaker: But to me, when I looked at it, it felt like this combination of the Book of Kells meets M.C.
Speaker: Escher meets Game of Thrones.
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
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So tell me a little more about these dragons.
Speaker: Yeah, the dragons, I think, are trying to really tie into what the author here is seeing as something ancient.
Speaker: You know, the Book of Kells is a good example of this.
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
Speaker: what has been left of the past.
Speaker: Often that's monuments or manuscripts, art.
Speaker: And so the dragons that you're seeing here are specifically antiquarian in perspective.
Speaker: It's capturing all of those trends, pulling it.
Speaker: But it's kind of like, you think about the 1950s retrofuturism
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: And now we look back at that and we see it as quaint and particularly a flavor of the 50s.
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.
Speaker: modern, these modern coherent movements of who the Scots are, what the history of Scotland is, what it means to be Scottish.
Speaker: And now we look back at it and we say, wow, that's so Victorian.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
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.
Speaker: And so we have to back up for a moment and talk about this guy, Charles.
Speaker: So he and his brother, James, were known as the Sobieski Stuarts, if I'm saying that right.
Speaker: There's a lot of mystery around them.
Speaker: And in fact, they both went by various different names.
Speaker: Why was that?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Well, the why, I think some people could dispute.
Speaker: Well, at least they would dispute, perhaps.
Speaker: Uh-huh.
Speaker: I'm not sure it's so disputable anymore.
Speaker: Essentially, they're given names.
Speaker: They were the Allens.
Speaker: They were born in Wales, and they were actually English.
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...
Speaker: connect to their supposed ancestry that they were putting forth, which was that they were
Speaker: the grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the sort of last claimant to the Stuart throne.
Speaker: You know, he in the 18th century actually lands in Scotland and the Scottish support him.
Speaker: And of course, you have the Battle of Culloden essentially ends his claims when he and his backers lose.
Speaker: And the reason that this is so important is because it's very tied to Scottish patriotism.
Speaker: The tartans that we think about today, the Scottish tartans, those were associated with Highlanders, Highlander wares.
Speaker: You didn't see them so much in the Lowlanders.
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.
Speaker: And so when his claim failed, when they lost in battle,
Speaker: Certain types of those tartans were then banned by the British government.
Speaker: And then that creates a sort of reactive patriotism centered around these ideas of Scottish tartans and the lost histories of Scottish clans.
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...
Speaker: like the heirs essentially of the Stuart dynasty.
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: So did they have any evidence actually to support these claims that they had royal blood?
Speaker: Not really.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So it was really just a sort of, you know, some combination of hope and deception.
Speaker: Yes, they were very cultured.
Speaker: They were very educated and they were very genteel in their manners.
Speaker: So they were impressive to people.
Speaker: And part of what they did initially is they would kind of only do this through implication.
Speaker: They weren't necessarily immediately outright saying this.
Speaker: They would just take on the name.
Speaker: Oh, you know, Stuart.
Speaker: And...
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.
Speaker: You know, the lost steward throne, we all kind of regret that things happen the way they did.
Speaker: And there's something very compelling about the legend of that.
Speaker: And so for a while, that just seemed very innocuous.
Speaker: It didn't seem like it hurt anyone for these people to go around and make those claims that nothing's happening.
Speaker: But then in the 1840s, they published a book of Scottish Tarments.
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.
Speaker: And so the very provenance of this manuscript that they were putting forth for publication was tied to their claims.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So they might have overreached a little in pushing this.
Speaker: And so the manuscript is called the Vestiarium Scoticum, which is very, very fancy Latin title.
Speaker: But it just means that basically it's a book about Scottish dress, right?
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: It's just Scottish dress.
Speaker: And there was one scholar who called it something like the most controversial costume book ever published.
Speaker: Wow.
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.
Speaker: Maybe there's a lot of controversy in that field.
Speaker: Yeah, well, I do, I kind of love the sort of both esteem and shade that that statement implies.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: And I saw there was another historian who said that it was shot through with pure fantasy and barefaced forgery.
Speaker: So really not mincing words there.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: So was that, I mean, was that criticism justified?
Speaker: Pretty much.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, that's pretty well established by scholars today.
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.
Speaker: And they said they described this manuscript that they had that had been passed down through their ancestry.
Speaker: And he was totally taken in by it and super excited about it.
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.
Speaker: And an example of someone who immediately questioned it was Sir Thomas's friend, Walter Scott.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So Sir Thomas writes to Walter Scott and says, isn't this amazing?
Speaker: And Scott says, you know, I would perhaps...
Speaker: maybe take a step back from this because I'm not sure that this is right.
Speaker: And one of the main things that Scott, Scott was an antiquarian himself.
Speaker: He was really careful about his sources.
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.
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.
Speaker: So for Scott, he immediately said, I really don't think that this is how Tartans work.
Speaker: And there are a number of signs in this that I just feel that this is wrong.
Speaker: And there's this moment early on when
Speaker: Sir Thomas, he says, okay, well, let's take it to the British Museum and they can look at it.
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.
Speaker: It's from our family.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: And conveniently, they say, oh, I guess we can't talk to the experts of the British Museum.
Speaker: But time goes on, they keep on living their sort of genteel romantic exiles, descendants of royal's life.
Speaker: And in the 40s, they actually do publish what they call essentially the printed version of their lost manuscript.
Speaker: And that book, Vestiarum at Scotacombe, that actually came out the same year.
Speaker: as this manuscript was produced in 1842.
Speaker: Yeah, so this is super interesting to me.
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
Speaker: antiques and antiquities.
Speaker: And so, you know, unscrupulous individuals try to fill that demand however they can.
Speaker: But this is a couple of generations before that.
Speaker: And, you know, the forgery of this bestiarum scotticum is
Speaker: You know, that is tied to a much larger con artist project that Charles and James are engaged in.
Speaker: So it's just quite interesting to me that they're sort of ahead of the curve vis-a-vis antiques forging.
Speaker: Yeah, I think when you talk about it in the marketplace sense, I think you're right.
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.
Speaker: But in fact, the Allens, the Sobieski-Stewards, were working in sort of older traditions of forgery.
Speaker: You might do it for other reasons.
Speaker: So a good example of this is the poems of Ossian.
Speaker: I'm not sure if you're familiar with these.
Speaker: This is from the 18th century.
Speaker: This poem
Speaker: Scottish poet James MacPherson published the poems of Ossian.
Speaker: He claimed that these were ancient sources and that he had just sort of translated them from old or Scottish Gaelic.
Speaker: And it made a huge impact.
Speaker: And of course, that was a forgery.
Speaker: It was a modern creation.
Speaker: Yeah, wow.
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.
Speaker: And you can see it's often tied to, you know, that idea of what people want to believe.
Speaker: They want to believe in this great Scottish Gaelic tradition of these amazing poems and how that actually would
Speaker: tie really into the burgeoning romantic movement, the Gaelic revival, all of that.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, okay.
Speaker: It's 1842.
Speaker: They published it.
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.
Speaker: So what was the context around that?
Speaker: Who, who, why did he make it at this time and who was he making it for?
Speaker: Yeah, I know he was making it for.
Speaker: He was making it for Sir Thomas de Glouder, who, as we said earlier, he was one of their earliest champions.
Speaker: He's the one who was trying to convince Scott that their manuscript was real and correct.
Speaker: And this was presented as a gift to him the year that their first book about Scottish chargons comes out.
Speaker: And my surmise is that he did this in order to essentially thank him for his support.
Speaker: He had at this point been supporting them nearly 15 years against all of their naysayers.
Speaker: And so that is my surmise.
Speaker: I don't know that.
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.
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.
Speaker: And the interesting thing about these sort of serpentine letters and ornaments in this manuscript is
Speaker: And this was pointed out to me by Craig Buchanan, who is the Sobiesti Stuart authority.
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.
Speaker: So there's a sense that, you know, Sir Thomas was supporting their literary ambitions and their publication of these manuscripts.
Speaker: And here is Charles Edward giving him one of the original manuscripts that's sort of tied to these other works.
Speaker: Fascinating.
Speaker: So what do you know about what happened in the book after 1842?
Speaker: I don't know anything almost.
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.
Speaker: There's no signs of provenance except the original ones of the presentation on
Speaker: Sir Charles Edward, his signature, as well as the gift specifically to Sir Thomas.
Speaker: And that's it.
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.
Speaker: In the book world, these books can live many lives and pass many hands without any
Speaker: known sign of who those owners were.
Speaker: There's not necessarily a chain of provenance.
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.
Speaker: But that's the exception that kind of pulls the rule that most folks pass hands very quietly across generations.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: It's fascinating.
Speaker: And so it hasn't been on the market before.
Speaker: It hasn't gone through auction houses or dealers, that sort of thing.
Speaker: It's just been floating around in the ether somewhere.
Speaker: Well, here's the thing.
Speaker: Maybe it has, but not properly identified.
Speaker: So when we first got this, we were cataloging it pretty much from this perspective of this is high Gothic revival.
Speaker: These are incredibly beautiful letter forms, and we're attracted to it as like an aesthetic object.
Speaker: And then because it was Scottish, it has a Scottish coat of arms in the front and we had that provenance.
Speaker: I actually ran it by one of the very famous sort of authorities on Scottish collecting and that's Bill Zacks.
Speaker: And I said, hey, what do you think of this?
Speaker: Have you seen anything like this?
Speaker: And he wrote back and he said, this is very interesting.
Speaker: Did you realize that the Charles Edward here is Charles Stuart Edward, one of the Sobieski-Stewart brothers?
Speaker: And I said...
Speaker: No, Bill.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: And that is the thing that then unfolded this entire story.
Speaker: So it initially started as this gut, I love this.
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.
Speaker: He gives us another thread to pull.
Speaker: That's how we get in contact with someone like I mentioned, Craig Buchanan, who
Speaker: is the main authority on Sobieski stewards.
Speaker: And then you get this entire story that is just sort of slumbering in this manuscript.
Speaker: I mean, maybe it was on the market 40 years ago, but not identified as the Sobieski stewards manuscript.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: How did things turn out for the Sobieski stewards, by the way?
Speaker: Well, they essentially lived the rest of their lives making this argument that they were indeed part of that dynasty.
Speaker: To the end of their lives, they did that.
Speaker: That sounds exhausting.
Speaker: I know.
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.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, you do have to wonder at a certain point whether they had convinced themselves.
Speaker: Once you live it for so long, you do wonder.
Speaker: I do think Sir Thomas was convinced.
Speaker: That seems to be the case.
Speaker: But, you know, it is fairly clear that the manuscripts that they were creating were forgeries.
Speaker: And when you were actively creating that material, at some point you have to say, am I making reality?
Speaker: Or am I just mirroring it in this sort of... It is almost a joke on reality.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're trying to reshape reality even while you know it's not reality.
Speaker: Gosh, fascinating.
Speaker: So what do you think might motivate a collector to want to add this manuscript to their collection?
Speaker: Well, one thing I like about this book is that there are a lot of ways into it.
Speaker: So my initial gut for it was just on an aesthetic basis.
Speaker: Just visually, it blew me away, and that was good enough for me.
Speaker: And then the rest followed, right?
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.
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.
Speaker: And today we take a lot of this for granted.
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.
Speaker: And this all ties into that.
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.
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.
Speaker: What makes something real?
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?
Speaker: How much can you kind of push that?
Speaker: you know, and see what can get people believe.
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.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Well, Rebecca Romney, thank you so much for joining me and for sharing this wonderful book with us.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: As you can see, this book, I love talking about it.
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.
Speaker: Well, again, listeners, you can see images of this at the magazineantiques.com slash podcast.
Speaker: You can, of course, also see it at Type Punch Matrix, Rebecca's website, and best of luck selling it.
Speaker: Thank you, Ben.
Speaker: What a pleasure.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit and I'm Ben Miller.
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