The Special Collections are closed so no #FakeFriday @ubleiden today but instead the very real and authentic 'Spring' by Saenredam/Goltzius (1596). Happy Easter from #thefakerepublic, everyone!

#bookhistory #earlymodern #histodons

The first spring sun in the Special Collections Room @ubleiden and a desk full of 17th-century books and pamphlets: preparing my paper (about #thefakerepublic and our new special collection of fakes and forgeries) for next week's Contesting Authenticity conference in London. Join us: https://authenticity2023.wordpress.com/programme/ !

#earlymodern #earlymodons #forgerystudies @bookhistodons

#FakeFriday in #thefakerepublic - I spent the afternoon taking photographs of this infamous forgery with @ubleiden. The pamphlet, commonly known as The Eleven Articles, is a treaty between England and Amsterdam that was fabricated by the circle of Stadholder Willem II in order to create support for his imminent attack on the city in July 1650. More on this soon on @ubleiden 's wonderful blog.

#FakeFriday@ubleiden
- If you fabricate stories to prove that the Jesuits are liars, then what does that make you? Though they were soon exposed as a fake after their first appearance in 1615, the Monita Secreta continued to be published for centuries, like in this Dutch translation from 1732. Watch this space for many more anti-Jesuit forgeries from #thefakerepublic
| #histodons #bookhistory #earlymodern

Brilliant forgery conference coming up in London in March, with a paper by yours truly on the Leiden Collection of Fakes and Forgeries @ubleiden
and #thefakerepublic. For the preliminary programme, see: https://authenticity2023.wordpress.com/programme/

As things are getting grimmer by the hour on Twitter (more Rossi sock puppets and a new attack on Peter Kidd), I wonder what Johann Burckhardt Mencke would have made of #Receptiogate and @CarlaRossi. To those who still have some popcorn left to finish, I thoroughly recommend De Charlataneria Eruditorum (1713/15), his two lectures on academic fraud. Happy New Year from #thefakerepublic! | #histodons #forgerystudies

Another wonderful false imprint @ubleiden: it's from the collection of Prosper Marchand and this time Pierre Marteau is hiding the identity of the formidable female printer Susanne de Caux, who published the first few editions of Lettres persanes (including this second edition) in Amsterdam. Marteau, De Caux, Marchand and Montesquieu all united in this one copy - the French Enlightenment in #thefakerepublic | #histodons #enlightenment #earlymodons #earlymodern #bookhistory

You know that feeling, when you open an old book and a previously unnoticed handwritten note falls out? As I was working on Nodot's Satyricon forgery today, a manuscript bomb exploded in my face when I opened Pieter Burman's 1709 Petronius edition - dozens of notes and letters, none of them listed! #histodons, #classics #earlymodern #thefakerepublic

#FakeFriday @ubleiden - the joy of false imprints! I spent this week with Pierre Marteau, the Cologne printer invented in the 1660s, probably by Jan Elzevir, to avoid the censors. Marteau went on to become the most prolific (and ancient!) of European printers, publishing books well into the 19th century. What is your favourite false imprint? #thefakerepublic #histodons #bookhistory #earlymodern #earlymodons

This week I have been working on false imprints, like this one. This is not the first edition of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which Jan Rieuwertsz published under a false imprint in Amsterdam in 1670. It is the second edition from 1672, made to look as if was left over from the first batch and intended to fool the censors twice in #thefakerepublic. #histodons #forgerystudies #earlymodern

Friday desk at @ubleiden - with Inghirami and Psalmanazar (both for a new forgery course) and Dutch translations of Ossian and the Monita Secreta (for the new collection). Life is good in #thefakerepublic. #earlymodons #earlymodern

Cave, cave, cave. I spent this morning with the Bibliotheca Thysiana's copy of Inghirami's Ethruscarum Antiquitatum Fragmenta (1637) @ubleiden.

It's absolutely pristine: perhaps Johannes Thysius bought it in the 1640s but then found out that it was a fake and decided against reading it? However fake it is, it remains a gorgeous book and this is by far the best copy I have seen.

#histodons #bookhistory #forgerystudies #thefakerepublic