Now and again, I had Nicole retrieve the fragile original for side-by-side comparisons of this or that page. Immodest or not, we both thought the likeness to the Fletcher copy was very strong, though we had to wonder if any two of the dozen, or rather baker’s dozen, copies were identical matches to their siblings. I strongly doubted it. But to find out would take a small corps of amenable rare-book librarians to bring their individual copies of Tamerlane, along with the two privately owned ones, to an agreed-upon bibliographic bunker where they could be set side by side and painstakingly compared. Imagine the logistics of such a scene, imagine the scholarly jockeying. Imagine the insurance costs and white-gloved guards. Like a convocation of the forty-three surviving Fabergé eggs, if nowhere near as visually alluring, nor as astronomically pricey. Point was, any differences between our Tamerlane and the one Calvin Thomas published in June or July not quite two hundred years ago were, to my mind, of little consequence. One could not fully cast the other in doubt, I believed. And unless our copy was scrutinized in the bowels of a cyclotron, which would probably never happen once it was tucked safely back into the obscurity of Mrs. Fletcher’s solander case, I felt certain it could withstand close examination.
Nicole had mixed a perfect iron gall ink. Slader had provided impeccable plates and paper. The print job went swiftly without a hitch—I’d long since learned how to work the press with one of my hands maimed—once we had everything readied. And though we used all the available cover stock in order to get one that was more than respectable, that piece of the puzzle had fallen into place as well. Time had come to bind our book.
“We can guesstimate the binding thread,” I told Nicole.
“It’s not visible to the naked eye anyway,” she agreed, running her silver-ringed fingers through her choppy pageboy hair. “Just have to go with the right weight and a natural off-white color. Line up the three stab holes and sew it with this stitch I found online from the period. Shouldn’t be an issue. I’ll handle that myself like we do with other books.”
“Our Achilles’ heel here is the paste,” I ventured.
Nicole disagreed, and as she explained that recipes for glues and pastes had hardly changed in centuries, I was once again reminded that, notwithstanding my every effort to steer my gifted daughter clear of the precincts of forgery, she possessed more of the counterfeiter’s mental and physical tools than perhaps even I did. Fortunately, she seemed not to have developed the dark and essential frailty that all forgers share
Hubris. All these years I thought I’d finally shaken it, as one shakes a nasty flu. But it had been a revelation to me, working on this Poe project—look, even that white-collar terminology has about it the tangy scent of hubris—how deeply embedded it was in me, how there was no shaking such an alluring demon. Yes, alluring. Because the hubris I refer to is imbued with a kind of dark joy, a joy that comes from the admittedly amoral satisfaction of hornswoggling so-called experts, of beating the system. But amoral or not, I had been doing my best to hide my bleak yet real happiness while laboring beside my daughter, all the while hoping she would read my passion as having to do only with being together, teaching and learning, working at our craft in a good cause.
We would have Tamerlane ready to deliver on schedule. The letter was another matter. While I felt dirty after my every encounter with Henry Slader, this was a rare instance when I wished I knew how to contact him so we could talk about not just the letter but his intention to present the only known signed copy of Poe’s first book to the literary world. It was, I’d come to believe, hubris taken one step farther. Indeed, over the precipice. Credulity abounds, especially among the greedy. But it must be stretched with care, not bent so much that it risks being broken. While a heretofore unknown autographed copy would generate a lot of excitement, it would also beg for skepticism, especially in a book this desirable. Poe himself hadn’t allowed his name to be printed on the cover, instead choosing coyly to assign authorship to an anonymous Bostonian.
While Boston was indeed his birthplace, why had Edgar done this? I had come to learn that conjectures were plentiful. Creditors from unpaid gambling debts needed to be dodged, as did Poe’s foster father, who was furious with him for the gambling losses he’d racked up before leaving the University of Virginia. Even joining the army was, for Poe, a cloaked affair. Lying about his age and name, he enlisted as twenty-two-year-old Edgar A. Perry a month or two before Tamerlane was published. Nor is it certain the printer Thomas ever knew the poet’s real name. Poe’s twofold desire to remain anonymous while at the same time seeing Tamerlane enjoy critical and public acclaim, or at least notice, was problematic, to say the least. No, the unsullied Tamerlane was sufficient for our cause. Were it up to me, I’d revel in the discovery and leave it at that.
Being charged with forging a letter and faking a signature was preferable to being charged with a far graver offense, however. Feeling every bit a character out of one of Poe’s tales of ratiocination—I was missing only a meerschaum and tapers that might throw “the ghastliest and feeblest of rays”—I slipped out of bed around midnight on Thursday and crept downstairs to the studio. Door locked behind me, I retrieved my box of nibs and pens from a high shelf and began scribing, on modern paper, trial runs of the master’s hand.
A forger’s calligraphy has much to do with confidence, which encourages the proper flow necessary to mimic the original, and muscle memory, which gives the practiced forger the ineffable ability to inhabit, if you will, what’s going down on the page. Consider an amateur pianist, who must think about notes, scales, time signatures, and fingering. The handful of true players, by contrast, have so mastered these mechanical aspects that they become the very music they play. All that’s left is to imbue it with life and soul, to expound upon the composer’s intentions while bringing one’s own storytelling genius to the keyboard. This is why Meg loved the Goldberg Variations when played by Glenn Gould or Murray Perahia, but didn’t care for performances by other renowned pianists. The notes were the same but the accounts differed. Similarly, with literary forgeries, the shapes of letters, impress of nib, tint of ink, were essential building blocks. But wizardly forgers, the rare virtuosos among our small community of misfits dead and alive, had to inhabit the writer at hand so fully that they truly, for magical minutes, became the author.
My muscle memory was intact, it seemed. While Poe had not been my forte in the past—Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats had that questionable distinction—I’d studied his handwriting carefully and even launched inscribed copies of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque into an unsuspecting, quite welcoming world, where collectors snatched them up. I even had the audacity to autograph the Pym in both Edgar’s and fictional Arthur’s hands—Poe purportedly forging the latter on a lark—which should have been a tip-off but wasn’t. The book is out there somewhere even now, treasured by its proud owner, who may or may not know that, with the exception of a single authentic one the author inscribed to a mysterious Mary Kirk Petrie, there are no recorded copies of Pym actually signed by Poe, Pym, or, for that matter, Roderick Usher. Cheek and whimsy I didn’t lack in my prime.