A fascinating read about fakes, forgeries, and frauds. What’s real? What’s fake? Why do we care? In this time of false news and fake science, these questions are more important than ever. Fakes, Forgeries, and Frauds goes beyond the headlines, tweets, and blogs to explore the true nature of authenticity and why it means so much today. This book delivers nine fascinating true stories that introduce the fakers, forgers, art authenticators, and others that populate this dark world. Examples include: Shakespeare—How an enterprising teenager in the 1790s faked Shakespeare and duped Literary London. Rembrandt—How art history, connoisseurship, and science are re-shaping our view of what Rembrandt painted and how the canvas changed over time. Relics—Was Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, a real Roman teenager who was martyred 1,800 years ago in the same place where her church stands today? Jackson Pollock—How do experts pick out the real Pollocks from the thousands of fakes? Nuremberg—How repeated reconstructions of medieval Nuremburg—including one by Adolf Hitler—show how historic preservation became a tool for propaganda. Fakes, Forgeries, and Frauds also raises provocative questions about the meaning of reality. What happens when spiritual truth conflicts with historic fact? Can an object retain its essence when most of it was replaced? Why did some art patrons value an excellent copy more than the original? Why do we find fakes so eternally fascinating, and forgers such appealing con artists? Fakes, Forgeries, and Frauds is a full-color book with 30 color photos. It shows that reality, exemplified by discrete physical objects, is actually mutable, unsettling, and plainly weird. Readers discover things that are less than meets the eye—and might even reconsider what’s real, what’s fake, and why they should care.

The untold stories of some of history's most notorious art cons—and the secret history of fakes, frauds, and forgeries in the art world

Presents a comprehensive collection of true stories involving some of the world's most famous forgeries, scams, and fakes including the alleged "Hitler diaries," art forgeries, and much more.

"Scientific Investigation of Copies, Fakes and Forgeries is a comprehensive guide to the technical and scientific study of the authenticity of a wide range of antiquities and artworks. It is the first book to provide a full survey of the subject of forgery from a scientific basis, examining a wide range of materials and techniques." "The demand for copies, fakes and forgeries is driven by rising prices in an international marketplace. The book examines the available new technologies and ever more sophisticated forging techniques, looking at production and distribution of fraudulent artworks. The subject is exemplified by numerous internationally based case studies, some turning out not to be as conclusive as is sometimes believed." "The book is aimed at those who need to understand the available approaches to and methods of scientific and technical authentication, be they curator, collector, conservator or scientist." --Book Jacket.

Describes the different ways con artists use fraud to get money, including stealing identities, copying paintings, and counterfeiting money, and how they are caught.

Presents information on the forensic science used to detect fakes, counterfeits, and forgeries.

Right from the beginning, classical literature has been embroiled with questions of authenticity, fakes, frauds, and, of course, scandal. Issues of dubious authorship, and contested authority confront philologists, critics and publishers today as surely as they did in the classical era itself. The new era of postmodernism, however, encourages us to look at the work of the forger with fresh eyes, and recent scholarship reflects this in an interdisciplinary approach which goes well beyond the conventional academic endeavor to separate the authentic from the fake. Fakes and Forgers of Classical Literature comprises essays from an international cast of scholars who, in their diverse and creative approaches to questions of authenticity both old and new, radically revise the position of the forged text in the literary tradition and, in light of modern approaches of philology and literary criticism, offer exciting new strategies for understanding forgery and the play with authenticity within ancient literature itself.