When I glanced at him across the drafting table by the sunny window, he was oddly smiling at me. He had smirked and grinned before, but I couldn’t remember ever witnessing Henry Slader smile. That smile brought me back, like a dropped stone, to my senses.
The plates for front and back covers, which we unwrapped next, would have to be proofed on the Vandercook, their registration meticulously matched with the original. At first blush, they looked almost too perfect, counterintuitive as that may sound. In this, as in any forgery worthy of running the gauntlet of high-minded, keen-eyed experts, perfection was less compelling than the stab of the real. Just the right amount of imperfection was key to fakery’s rising toward the believable. I would have to remedy its antiseptic newness by aging the decorative border surround just a touch, degrading the type here and there to look more like the Fletcher copy.
“Solid quality,” I said. “Who made these?”
He looked past me out the window to where several deer stood at the bottom of the field, browsing low-hanging branches laden with heavy leaves. “Unwise question, man. Not to forget, the less you know, the better off you and yours will be.”
Masking my irritation with a veneer of deference, I removed the text plates from their kraft-paper wrapping. Plates like these are heavy for their bulk and easily damaged if dropped. Anyone observing me might have thought I was handling precious gems, given how cautious I was in transferring them from their packaging to the stainless-steel shelves beside the Vandercook.
“Do you have any idea how hard it will be to make a decent copy of this pamphlet? It’s delicate as can be, so unevenly printed in the first place, so damned inconsistent. This level of amateur work is beyond hard to replicate—”
“Make it of its period, of its day, and we’ll be golden. Where’s the original, out of curiosity?” he asked.
“I don’t think I’ll tell you.”
He chuckled, glancing sidelong in the direction of my fireproof safe. “Suit yourself. Just don’t lose it.”
No need for me to respond.
“There’s one more thing.”
I glanced at my watch. Unless Nicole’s train was late, Meghan and Maisie would already have picked her up and the three of them would be shopping in Rhinebeck by now.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be out of here in a heartbeat,” he said. “I have just one other item I wanted to leave with you. Like the Tamerlane, this needs a virtual twin,” and with that Slader produced from his satchel a stiff card envelope from which he pulled a letter protected in a clear Mylar sleeve.
Taking the handwritten document, I scrutinized the time-faded signature at the bottom of the leaf, which read, Yr. Obt. St. Edgar A Poe, underscored with the same wavy flourish I had seen on other Poe letters. A flourish that Poe himself, in his Chapter on Autography, charmingly referred to as being “but part of the writer’s general enthusiasm.”
“Your obedient servant, Edgar Allan Poe,” Slader needlessly translated.
To my amazement and dismay, I was persuaded by its seeming legitimacy. Poe’s even word spacing; his letters, well formed if larger and less legible than in later years; his rectilinear baseline; the basic consistency of his cursive—it was all there. Even down to the A being slightly smaller than the E and P, an idiosyncrasy I had read about that one graphologist rightly or wrongly interpreted as a subconscious snub to his foster father, John Allan, with whom Poe had a strained relationship, at best.
“Who’s this recipient?”
“As you’ll see when you read it, he was apparently an editor at a Boston newspaper. Looks like Poe delivered the book to him hoping for a review, a brief mention, any crumb of acknowledgment,” Slader said. He explained that only the North American Review and United States Review and Literary Gazette—both of which had offices on Washington Street, conveniently near Calvin Thomas’s print shop—had bothered to note Tamerlane’s existence in 1827. The letter’s addressee, Theodore Johnston, appeared to be just one more literary gatekeeper who refused to waste a single drop of ink on Poe’s modest pamphlet. When, Slader went on, the August issue of The Boston Lyceum came out that year, it included some remarks by one Samuel Kettell, who wrote of “a young gentleman who lately made his debut as an author by publishing a small vol. of misc. Poems, which the critics have read without praising, and the ladies have praised without reading.” Assuming it was Poe to whom Kettell referred, the “young gentleman” was both mocked and unnamed.
“Pretty put-down,” I said. “But Kettell might have been insulting somebody else.”
“True, but since he listed Tamerlane two years later in his volume Specimens of American Poetry, acknowledging Poe as its author, some scholars think that the earlier reference was to Edgar.”
I shrugged. “Old news. Anyway, by 1829, I suppose it hardly mattered since the thing had sunk into total obscurity. So what you’re saying is that this letter was mailed along with the Tamerlane?”
“Mailed or, more likely, hand-delivered. I’m thinking hand-delivered since both Thomas and Poe had little money, and back in the day it would’ve been an awkward size to post. Poe was in the army, stationed at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor, but he might have gotten leave to go into town, and could’ve delivered it then. Who knows? Since the envelope’s lost, if there ever was one, it’s anybody’s guess, but it was folded and tucked inside the pamphlet.”
“Why did you remove it?”
“Because that’s what I did.”
Obstinate bastard, I thought, and moved on. “Is there any other known example of the book with a letter?”
“Nary a one,” said Slader. “As Abigail Fletcher tells it, though she’s by no means certain, Johnston was a relative of a relative, a hoarder who never tossed things out—”
“Seems to run in their blood.”
“—and whose accumulation of books for review, broadsides, pamphlets, letters, and the like stayed in an attic for decades until her grandfather, or great-grandfather, went through the rat’s nest and tried to separate the wheat from the chaff.”
“To mix a metaphor,” I gibed. “How do I know you didn’t forge this?”
Unamused, Slader jutted his chin. “You don’t. No matter, I want you to make a copy, if you’re still adept. But with variations in the wording of the cover letter—which I’ll leave to you—and the name of a different critic in the header, one that’s close to the original. The information is in here,” and he handed me a slip of modern paper with the name typed on it.
“I’m as adept as you,” I retorted, wondering if it was true. “Just, I’m not doing that anymore.”