The Private Library

Let's Get Technical at The Private Library

One of the greatest difficulties in writing a blog for an audience that spans the spectrum from rank beginner to seasoned veteran is just how technically precise one should be so as to (a) not offend the seasoned veteran yet (b) remain somewhat comprehensible to the rank beginner.

Like any profession, bookselling and librarianship have developed over the centuries very precise terminologies within which specific words have very specific meanings.  Example: while in general use the word codex refers simply to a book format in which pages are gathered together in signatures and bound between covers (the sense in which we used the word in yesterday's post), most professional booksellers and librarians use the term in a much more restricted sense, applying it only to manuscripts that were produced in this format prior to the advent of printing (of course, bound manuscripts were produced after the advent of printing as well, as can be seen from the 18th century example depicted below, on offer from Buddenbrooks):

Short of giving everyone a copy of ABC for Book Collectors and suggesting that we all turn to page x, y or z for the sense in which a particular term is being used, we do not know how best to address this situation.  Most likely, given the numerous constraints on our time, we shall continue to muddle along as best we can, the occasional infelicity the price we pay for greater inclusiveness.

One final note: while we try to be as "objective" as possible in penning these posts, in reality there is no such thing.  Our experiences, our education, our interests....all of these color every word we write, as is true of every author you have ever read or ever will read.  

Caveat emptor....

If only I had known THEN what I know NOW...at The Private Library

Every book collector, if he or she collects long enough, picks up all sorts of useful bits of information that beginning book collectors would dearly love to possess.  What booksellers, for example, should one always avoid (and why)?  Where are you most likely to find an overlooked bargain (and why)?  Are there any organizations of book collectors that are welcoming to beginning book collectors?  Are there any book fairs that no book collector should miss (why)?  Is there any particular book about book collecting, book history or books in general that every beginning book collector must read before ever spending a single dollar (why)?

This is your chance to help folks new to the hobby find their way through the woods to a private library of their own.   Your blogger is working with Chris Lowenstein, bookseller extraordinaire, to produce a print article aimed squarely at folks who are brand new to book collecting.  All the things you had to learn the hard (and often expensive) way, we want to make a bit easier for new collectors.  Because without a massive infusion of new book collectors, the future of the codex may be much more tenuous than the hard-core among us would like to admit:

Drop me a line with your ideas as to what you feel every new book collector should know before they start compiling their own private library: [email protected]

(P.S.--If Chris and I use your idea, we'll need your permission to quote you.)

Index Librorum Prohibitorum and The Private Library

For a little over 400 years--from 1559 to 1966--the Roman Catholic Church proscribed what could and could not be read by the Catholic faithful in a series of lists of prohibited books, the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum:

Ostensibly published to guide the faithful away from works of dubious moral value, as well as away from books containing theological errors (as determined by the Church hierarchy), the Index was never a single mammoth list, but rather a series of lists that were compiled under a variety of Popes and church councils.

The first such list, promulgated under the direction of Pope Paul IV, was known as The Pauline Index, while the next list in the series (which was developed by the Council of Trent in response to the perceived harshness of the first Index), was termed the Tridentine Index.

Scanning some of the surviving book collections of centuries past, one suspects that The Index may have served as a sort of handy guidebook to collecting for a certain breed of book collector (including not a few Protestants who could thereby publicly thumb their noses at Catholicism -- a huge number of Protestant authors were listed in the various indices for no other reason than Protestantism's supposed "theological errors").  In any event, the various manifestations of the Index are highly collectible in their own right:

   

One suspects that some folks today still use the various indices as guidebooks to collecting (might make for an interesting academic research topic).  Most indices were divided into three sections: authors whose works were banned in their entirety (perhaps an especially enticing collectible for some Protestant book collectors); authors who had some works banned but not others (perhaps because they had "corrected" a work after an earlier proscription); and topics which were banned as totally unacceptable (many of these were scientific works, but it was not the science that usually got them into trouble with the Church, as much as it was their "heretical," often Protestant, authorship).

As with all such attempts at censorship over the centuries, "mistakes were made."  The Polish nun Maria Faustina Kowalska, for example, whose Divine Mercy in My Soul was on the Index for over two decades, was later canonized as St. Faustina.  Many of Kepler's works wound up on the Index, as did works by luminaries such as Martin Luther, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes and many, many others. Surprisingly, many works that one might think would definitely be banned by the Index never were--neither Darwin's works on evolution nor Hitler's Mein Kampf were ever added to the Index....

  

Three Deckers and The Private Library

Institutional libraries have always exerted an enormous influence on what publishers publish.  Virtually no publisher today would be able to publish expensive serial publications like biomedical journals if institutional libraries did not buy up virtually the entire press run.  Publishers of hardback books of every persuasion likely would go belly-up did not most institutional libraries still prefer hardbacks to paperbacks because hardbacks can better absorb the hard wear of circulation.  But few modern institutional libraries have ever influenced what publishers publish as consistently and as significantly as Mudie's Circulating Library influenced publishing in Victorian Britain.

As George Landow notes in a recent article, from 1842 to 1894 Mudie's

influenced Victorian literature, particularly fiction, in two chief ways: first, by making sure that almost all novels appeared in three volumes, it had important effects on the structure, plot, style, and even imaginative worlds of the Victorian novel; and second, by acting as a censor who demanded fiction suited to the middle-class family, it controlled the subject, scope, and morality of the novel for fifty years....

Everything from Dickens' Great Expectations to Hardy's Return of the Native saw their first appearance in book form as a three-decker (the true first appearance in print often having been a serialization).  Sumner & Stillman, an ABAA bookseller based in Yarmouth, ME, has made something of a specialty of three-deckers by virtue of its focus on 19th century authors (as can be seen from the images below of titles currently on offer):

  

Mudie's preference for the three volume format was purely economic--it allowed him to circulate a single title to three different subscribers at the same time.  By forcing British publishers to price this format beyond the reach of the general public (while himself buying the very same books at an enormous discount), he realized substantial profits for over five decades.  (The images below are by way of The Kelmscott Bookshop and Adrian Harrington Rare Books):

  

Anyone interested in collecting three-deckers will want to have handy a copy of Griest:

Sotheby's held a major auction of three-deckers back in 1970-73, though the catalogs can be a bit difficult to locate. More likely to be available in the marketplace is a checklist that Sidney University compiled of the three-decker collection held by its Fisher Library back in 1980....

Idylls, Eclogues and The Private Library

The arrival of Spring reminds us that there is a long and distinguished Western literary tradition that we have, to date, inexplicably neglected.  Though it has various incarnations (e.g., bucolics, idylls, eclogues and the like), the tradition as a whole most usually is called pastoral literature.  

A 2006 BBC Radio 4 presentation defined the tradition as

offer[ing] a conventionalised picture of rural life, the naturalness and innocence of which is seen to contrast favourably with the corruption and artificialities of city and court life. Pastoral literature deals with tensions between nature and art, the real and the ideal, the actual and the mythical, and although pastoral works have been written from the point of view of shepherds or rustics, they have often been penned by highly sophisticated, urban poets and playwrights.

The tradition encompasses a wide range of poetry, prose and drama, and while it may no longer be as vibrant as in centuries past, the sheer variety of what has been written over the past two millenia insures that many book collectors still avidly seek exemplars for their shelves:

  

Modern readers often encounter specimens of pastoral literature without ever being aware of the long and distinguished tradition behind it:

...And I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies, 

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty lambs we pull;

Fair lined slippers for the cold, 

With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,

With coral clasps and amber studs:

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me, and be my love.

Christopher Marlowe's posthumous poem, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (above), is a well-known example of such encounters.

Perhaps the best-known English-language work of pastoral literature is Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes' Calendar, although the tradition may be traced as well in the works of English literary giants like Shakespeare and Milton, modern poets such as W. H.Auden, even novelists and short story writers like William Goyen:

Generally speaking, if the literary work currently commanding your attention prefers life-in-harmony-with-nature to other literary tropes, you likely have at hand a representative of pastoral literature.  A handy reference or two may be needed to make a final determination:

      

Two for One at The Private Library

One of the more unusual bindings that book collectors are likely to encounter in the course of their bookish peregrinations is the dos à dos (back-to-back) binding, which Etherington & Roberts helpfully defines as

[a] form of bookbinding in which two books, usually small and frequently of a complementary nature, e.g., a Psalter and New Testament, are bound back to back so that they open in opposite directions, one of the three boards being the common lower board of both volumes. The spines and fore edges are opposed. Their upper boards are usually either embroidered or covered with gold-tooled leather. However the dos à dos binding is picked up, it opens at the beginning of one of the two books.

The image below (from Garlic Harvest Studio) depicts this style quite well:

Were the above a printed book instead of a blank book, one would see that the printing of both texts is oriented in the same direction.

This is somewhat similar to a binding style known as tête-bêche (heel-to-toe): the difference between the two is that the printed texts in a tête-bêche binding are inverted 180° relative to each other (i.e., when one views one of the texts right-side-up, the other text is facing down). Also, in a tête-bêche binding there is, as Michael Smith notes, no back cover, but instead...two front covers and a single spine with two titles. This allows each story to have a separate cover, with appropriate artwork.  The image below (via Librairie Hervé Sciardet) demonstrates the style:

While the dos à dos binding dates back to the 16th century, it most often is encountered on devotional works of the 17th century (as depicted in this lot from a recent Christie's auction):

Of the two binding styles, the tête-bêche binding is by far the style most commonly encountered on modern books.  This is thanks largely to its prominent use in paperback publishing, where it has been frequently employed by publishers like Ace Doubles, Gryphon Doubles, Subterranean Press and the like. These publishers also have often used a follow-the-leader style for their "doubles," which produces a book with a single cover and separate back cover. Often there [is] only a single page between the end of the first story and the beginning of the next where advertising [is] placed. In later editions, this page...often [is] not present and the next story start[s] on the page following the end of the first tale.

For folks building a private library, such books offer an interesting way to conserve valuable shelf space....

PBOs and The Private Library (Part VIII)

Up until the middle of the 20th century, paperbacks had mostly been a way for publishers to make a buck by offering the public cheap reprints of what previously had been published in hardback.  And up until the end of the 19th century, this process had all been fairly straightforward due to the lack of international copyright law and/or rigorous enforcement of same. 

Penguin changed the rules of the game a bit when it launched its Pelican imprint in 1937 to publish non-fiction PBOs.  But it was the launch of Gold Medal Books in 1950 that would really make paperback originals an enduring, influential feature of paperback publishing:

   

Fawcett Publications had launched Gold Medal Books as a way to avoid a contract dispute with New American Library, for whom Fawcett distributed (via its newsstand operations) NAL's Mentor and Signet lines of paperback reprints.  Because the contract said nothing about publishing paperback originals, Fawcett tested the legal waters with a couple of anthologies of original material.  When these encountered no legal resistance from NAL, Gold Medal books was off and running.  Within six months over 9 million copies were sold.

Gold Medal's success was not lost on other paperback publishers, and eventually PBOs became a preferred format for several types of publishing. Many of the earliest PBOs are readily available in the marketplace for surprisingly little money, so long as one is not seeking such titles in pristine condition.  As the condition of such titles approaches Fine, expect to pay several hundreds of dollars (and sometimes much, much more) for scarcer titles and particularly collectible authors and/or illustrators:

  

Several factors impact a publisher's decision to publish a PBO instead of a hardback.  Most important, of course, is how many copies of a particular title the publisher expects to sell. The better known the author, the more controversial the topic, the more likely the publisher will publish in hardback.  And vice versa.  

In some niches, currency is a major factor--e.g., the rapidity with which books about computer programming, applications, hardware, etc., become obsolete means that most publishers in this niche publish most such titles as PBOs.  Books in series in a variety of genres are published primarily as PBOs--romance fiction is a well-known example.  Books that simply would cost too much to produce as hardbacks--a variety of art and photography books, for example--also often are published as PBOs.  To better serve the markets for such books, publishers have experimented over the years with a wide variety of formats, including larger PBOs such as the well-known King Penguins (which originally were designed to showcase illustration, and included many reprints):

  

The consequence of these many experiments mean that collectors sometimes wind up shelving a greater diversity of sizes than just the traditional mass market or trade paperback sizes.  This, along with glued spines and acidic paper, can wreak havoc on one's private library unless great care is taken to properly store and preserve the PBOs on which one has lavished so much attention.... 

PBOs and The Private Library (Part VII)

The proliferation of paperback publishers in the 1940s and 50s quickly led to a glut of paperbacks in the marketplace.  Many publishers lowered their production values in order to survive the increased competition, and not a few resorted to publishing "trashy literature" in order to make ends meet (often a euphemism for early attempts to publish realistic depictions of homosexuality):

   

This led the U. S. Congress to convene a special investigative committee in 1952 (the infamous Gathings Committee) to examine the corrupting influence that paperbacks' suggestive cover art and titillating stories were believed to be exerting on American morals. Fortunately, the committee went so overboard in its attacks against paperbacks (not to mention its equally overwrought attacks against comic books) that most readers were dismissive of the committee's final report, which carried a strong dissent from two of the committee's own members.  This bumbling effort at censorship is ably recounted in a number of titles which are readily available in the marketplace:

  

One of the defenses that had been advanced in favor of paperback publishing was that most such publishing was simply reprints of books that had previously been published in hardback without a problem.  Because relatively few PBOs had been published by this time, the defense had some merit to it. But the launch of Gold Medal Books only two years previous (1950) would shortly change all that....

PBOs and The Private Library (Part VI)

As we observed in a previous post, [b]ecause soldiering also sees often long periods of forced leisure, the American Civil War would play its own not inconsiderable part in the development of a market for paperbacks....  Bouts of forced leisure being endemic to warfare, paperback publishers during World War II also took advantage of this ready market.

Penguins were very popular during World War II, as Anne Trubek points out in a recent article for Smithsonian: Penguins, which were small enough to be stowed in the pocket of a uniform, were carried by soldiers, and they were chosen for the Services Central and the Forces Book Clubs. In 1940, Lane launched an imprint for youngsters, Puffin Picture Books, which children facing evacuation could carry with them to their new, uncertain home:

In the United States, the now highly collectible series of Armed Services Editions was launched by the Council on Books in Wartime.  These paperbacks, which were published from 1943-1946, served an important propaganda purpose, as was noted in the Council's slogan: books are weapons in the war of ideas:

   

ASEs were sold at cost to the U.S. government, which in turn distributed them free-of-charge to service men and women.  Only two complete sets of all 1324 titles in the series are believed to exist (one owned by a private collector, the other being the copyright deposit set at the Library of Congress):

  

Because both the Puffin Picture Books and the ASEs were subject to rigorous use, it is rare to find examples of either in anything approaching Fine condition.  However, the sheer quantity of books produced ensures that many titles remain available in the marketplace, often for very little money.  (The ASE series alone saw almost 123 million books enter circulation.)

While most of the above titles, like most of the titles of other paperback publishers we have covered in this series, were reprints rather than PBOs, Penguin had begun publishing PBOs as early as 1937 (when it launched its nonfiction imprint Pelican, an imprint that lasted until 1990).  Nonfiction paperbacks would prove to be a great success, as Pocket Books discovered when it published a paperback edition of a book simultaneously published in hardback in 1946.  That title (depicted below in its paperback edition) became the best-selling title that had ever been published in the United States up to that time (excepting the Bible)....

PBOs and The Private Library (Part V)

The extraordinary success of Penguin Books led American reprint publisher Robert deGraff to launch a similar experiment, with three important changes: [f]irst, he would cut the size of the book to 6 1/2 x 4 1/2; second, he would glue the pages instead of stitching them...a newly invented glue encouraged him; and third, he would gamble with a huge press run ten times that of Penguin.

A test was successfully conducted in 1938 with Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, which deGraff had printed in 2000 copies.  (The title was reprinted a year later as part of the regular series.)  After being rejected by several potential backers, deGraff's audacious experiment was formally launched in 1939 with financial backing from Simon and Schuster and distribution via the more prestigious Macy's and Liggett's department stores.  The first ten titles to debut with the kangaroo logo (appropriately labeled Pocket Books because they were small enough to fit in one's pocket) had press runs of some 20,000 copies each.  Both department store chains sold out within 24 hours:

   

After the launch of Pocket Books, modern paperback publishing grew quickly on several fronts, with a number of other brands following in short order: Avon; Popular Library; Dell Paperbacks; New American Library of World Literature (formerly American Penguin, which Kurt Enoch purchased from Allen Lane); and a great many more now-famous brands.  This often complex history is well-recounted in a number of titles that are readily available in the marketplace:

    

As we have noted in several previous posts (see, e.g., our posts of 25 June 2009, 30 June 2009, and 4 July 2009), the advent of pulp fiction earlier in the century would greatly influence the development of paperback publishing, and vice versa.  But war would have an equally great influence....

PBOs and The Private Library (Part IV)

The earliest paperback publishers had achieved modest success by using cheap materials, large press runs and non-traditional distribution venues (such as railway book stalls and mail order) to sell their books for significantly less money than hardbacks.  

In 1932, German entrepreneur Kurt Enoch, having absorbed the lessons of these earliest paperback publishers, co-founded Albatross Books, which began publishing tall, narrow books with pictureless, but color-coded paper covers (e.g., orange for fiction).  Albatross Books became an almost immediate success, so much so that Enoch and his partners were able to buy out an earlier German paperback publisher, Tauchnitz, whose 5000+ volume reprints of British and American authors had been available since 1841.  Regrettably, neither Albatross Books nor Tauchnitz would survive the Nazis.  (Enoch fled to America, where his influence on paperback publishing would be even greater.)

The success of Albatross Books in the London market led Allen Lane, the head of a famous but struggling British publisher of authors like Oscar Wilde, to imitate the simple design, color coding and animal-centric logo of Albatross.  The rest, as they say, is history...

  

Lane's backers had not been optimistic--Lane wanted to publish literary works, not the usual fare for paperbacks, and he wanted to sell his books not in bookstores, but in department stores.  The first ten titles, which appeared in the summer of 1935 and were available through F. W. Woolworth, sold out within two days. Penguin became a separate corporate entity a year later, setting up premises in the Crypt of the Holy Trinity Church on Marylebone Road, using a fairground slide to receive deliveries from the street above. Within twelve months, it had sold a staggering 3 million paperbacks.

Lane's success did not go unnoticed in America.  Another animal-centric logo, Gertrude, would soon grace a line of paperbacks destined to sell, via a single title, more books than had ever been sold in America (the Bible excepted)....

PBOs and The Private Library (Part III)

Most histories of paperback publishing tend to gloss over, or ignore altogether, the earliest attempts to develop this market, preferring instead to begin their narratives with the rise of the modern paperback in the 1930s.  This is unfortunate, since collectors thereby often remain unaware of the very significant influence that issues like postal rates and copyright law (or the lack thereof) had on the development of early markets for paperbacks:

  

 

For information on these earliest attempts to develop a mass market for paperbacks, collectors generally will need to turn away from general histories of paperback publishing and focus instead on histories devoted to specific exemplars of such publishing:

The advent of pulp paper caused many early paperback publishers to switch to a magazine format (from whence would arise both pulp fiction and the comic book industry), although successful paperback efforts like the Little Blue Books continued to suggest to mainstream publishers that a nascent mass market for paperbacks still existed:

  

The Little Blue Books relied on mail order for their success, as did Charles Boni Paper Books (which, ironically, would influence the development of book clubs more than the development of paperback publishing):

  

The last major attempt to produce paperbacks prior to the advent of what we today recognize as the modern paperback came in 1931, when Modern Age Books launched its famous threesome--Blue Seal Books were original titles for twenty-five cents each; Red Seal Books, usually priced at thirty cents, were classic reprints; and Gold Seal Books, at fifty cents, were illustrated works:

  

The modern paperback would soon make its debut....

PBOs and The Private Library (Part II)

Although it is to the the early part of the 20th century that the rise of the paperback as we know it today must largely be attributed, paper-bound books have been known for several centuries.  Almanacs, chapbooks and similar publications that were either readily dated or of little literary merit were almost always issued with paper covers in centuries past:

All other books required some degree of leisure and education to enjoy, and the folks who had the requisite leisure and education preferred their books hardbound.

Leisure and education did not begin to broadly impact the "lower classes" until the 18th century, and it was this considerable broadening of the reading public, combined with increasing mechanization of paper production, that would produce the first great paperback revolution, although this revolution would be short-lived, killed off by postal rates.  A more enduring commitment to mass production of paperbacks would occur with the coming of rail travel and literature especially suited to the long hours of enforced leisure that such travel necessitated.  Because soldiering also sees often long periods of forced leisure, the American Civil War would play its own not inconsiderable part in the development of a market for paperbacks:

  

But the real paperback revolution was yet to come....

PBOs and The Private Library (Part I)

PBOs, also known as paperback originals, are simply books whose First Edition usually (though not always) is published as a paperback rather than a hardback.  PBOs are quite common in genre fiction such as romance fiction and science fiction:

  

As the market for literary fiction shrinks, it is not at all uncommon to encounter even this type of fiction as a paperback original:

   

PBOs pose a number of problems for the average collector.  Of particular concern are PBOs issued as mass market paperbacks (the type most frequently published for first-time genre authors, which one finds in airports, supermarkets, drugstores and like venues).  These usually are printed on cheap paper that discolors and disintegrates fairly rapidly over time. 

The spine of mass market paperbacks also is a major concern--because of the manner in which the textblock is bound to the paper cover, most mass market paperbacks can only be opened a tiny bit without breaking the spine (as the image below, from Powell's Books, demonstrates):

Against these caveats must be set the very real advantages of paperbacks: they are easily portable; they often carry particularly attractive cover art; they do not take up a lot of shelf space; they are inexpensive.

To better understand the pros and cons of collecting PBOs, it is perhaps best that we explore a bit the history of paperbacks....

Treasures and The Private Library

We have expended copious amounts of electronic ink on this blog trying to convince folks that building a private library of one's own is neither particularly difficult nor particularly expensive, especially if one is willing to collect what others are not collecting.  Whether that happens to be pristine paperback copies of romance fiction or science fiction, or "obscure" topics like numismatics, or third editions of famous works instead of first editions, the key is to use the laws of supply and demand to your advantage as a collector.  If their is little demand but a large supply of the titles you seek in the marketplace, you are much more likely to acquire the books you seek at little expense than if the equation is reversed.

Of course, it is not always easy to tell what titles are in great demand or for which their exists an overabundant supply due to low demand.  But there are hints.

If, for example, an author or topic has a standard bibliography, chances are there are not a few collectors attempting to collect that author or topic:

If a major university or other library has mounted a permanent or rotating exhibition of rare books within its collections, chances are that not a few collectors still actively seek similar books.  If you do not live near such a library, and cannot therefore examine such books in person, fret not:  most such libraries have, at one time or another, published a volume or two (or three or more...) about these books.  The word treasure usually will be found somewhere in the title:

    

If the titles in which you are interested continually show up in auction reports from collector publications like The Book Collector or Fine Books and Collections, chances are that not a few people already are actively seeking such books.

Orient your collection towards some other author(s) or topics(s) if you want to expend much less money....

Stevengraphs and The Private Library

Folks who collect 19th century books will occasionally encounter buried deep within the pages of such books a pictorial strip of woven silk cloth used as a bookmark:

    

These "miniature tapestries" were manufactured by Thomas Stevens as early as 1862, and thus are generally known as Stevengraphs, although the term later came into general use for any woven silk item, regardless of manufacturer.  

While not that uncommon in general, particularly nice Stevengraphs (such as those depicted above) are quite scarce.  The survival of such nice specimens can often be attributed to decades of "hiding away," unnoticed and unloved, within the pages of Victorian-era books.

The standard reference for these now highly collectible bits of Victoriana is Geoffrey Godden's Stevengraphs and Other Victorian Silk Pictures (1971):

This title also has been reproduced on CD-ROM and is readily available thus....

Witcracking and The Private Library

... a college of witcrackers cannot flout me out of my humour.

Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing: Act V, Scene IV

53 years ago today (1957), the BBC broadcast the greatest television hoax ever perpetrated on a gullible public, its infamous harvesting of the spaghetti trees:

The BBC's hoax was in the great tradition of hoaxes that have been undertaken on All Fool's Day since at least the 14th century CE--e.g., the traditional April Fool's prank of washing the lions at the Tower of London; the advent of instant color television; and NPR's report of 1992's attempt by Richard Nixon (actually famed impersonator Rich Little) to again run for President:

Of course, not all great pranks have been played only on April 1st, nor have all great hoaxes been perpetrated only on television or radio.  The list of literary hoaxes is quite lengthy, and is every bit as infamous in its own right as any of the above.

In 1835, for example, the New York Sun newspaper published a hoax by Richard Locke in which the actually defunct EDINBURGH JOURNAL OF SCIENCE...pretended to reveal a discovery that men and animals existed on the moon....  [The hoax was] so cleverly wrought that, for a short time, the report was given credence in scientific circles in the United States and Europe.   The hoax also led to a huge increase in the Sun's circulation, and it was reprinted several times (the reprint below, from 1859, is currently on offer from L . W. Currey):

Among bibliophiles, the greatest of all such literary hoaxes remains that perpetrated in 1840 by antiquarian and retired military officer Renier Hubert Ghislain Chalon.  His invention of the  collection of Jean Nepomucene Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas, whose 52 books existed in but a single known copy of each, struck lust and envy into the hearts of bibliophiles throughout continental Europe:

Credo quia absurdum est....