As I uttered those words, Meghan leafed through the pamphlet and, withdrawing a small folded letter on thin paper that was laid inside, made the second important discovery of the day. Warily, she unfolded it twice and read aloud Poe’s brief missive to Theodore Johnston, while Sophie and her colleagues marveled, Cal whispering an all-purpose expletive.
“Can I have a look?” I asked unnecessarily, given she was already passing it over to me. For a moment I was sure Meg must have misread the addressee. So flawless was the forgery Nicole had produced that I might have been holding her letter to the fictional Thomas Johnson—so unimpeachable was the holograph, so credible the paper. Even the creases from the folds had been faultless, aged by my daughter and me using a bone folder to impress the antique stock first one way, then reversing the fold to press it from the other side. This procedure ensured that the fibers, unseeable by the naked eye, were properly broken. With a lightly moistened Q-tip, we’d barely dampened the crease edges, then placed the paper in the studio nipping press, screwed it tight, and by morning it had been deprived of its natural tendency to spring back open. But this letter in my hands was no forgery. Instead, I was holding the genuine, unrecorded handwritten note to Theodore Johnston from Edgar Allan Poe.
“And?” Sophie nudged.
“Nothing here physically suggests to me, at least at first blush, that this is anything other than Poe’s original letter to this critic Johnston, hoping he’d review the book,” I said.
Meghan then finally weighed in, her tone of voice more exasperated than exhilarated. “Until we decide what to do, we’re going to need to put these in a very safe place. Will, are you absolutely certain the book itself is correct?”
“I’m less sure about the signature than the book. Have you ever come across Joseph Cosey? One of the most notorious and successful forgers of all time, and a specialist in American historical documents. His stuff was so convincing, some of it’s still in circulation.”
“He did Poe?”
“Ben Franklin, Lincoln, Jefferson, your Twain right there,” I said, pointing at the Huckleberry Finn on the table. “And, yes, Poe.”
“You think this could be a Cosey?” Nicole asked, her forehead knotting.
“In a lesser book, possibly,” I said, aware that she was slyly helping me muddy the waters. “Cosey was more into forging letters and documents, and, besides, if he’d somehow had the good fortune to come upon a first edition of Tamerlane, he could have retired rather than getting caught and sentenced to prison again and again. The letter would be more in Cosey’s wheelhouse.” Though Cosey, of course, had died many years before Slader put a pencil to this pamphlet.
“We’ll deal with the letter. Right now I’m asking you about the book itself,” Meghan prodded.
“Over the years, as you know, there have been a number of facsimile editions printed, usually in limited editions. Columbia University Press did one back in the forties with a detailed introduction by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. There’s the 1884 George Redway, which I’ve never seen. William Andrews Clark Jr. had one printed up by John Henry Nash in the twenties. Couple of others, too. The Ulysses Bookshop in London issued one in 1931 that’s a pretty accurate reproduction, right down to the stitching and tea-colored wrappers, though they’re a little too gray and light.”
“We’ve handled a copy of that,” interjected Sophie. “It’s stamped ‘Facsimile’ in red ink on the last page.”
“Yes, and if you’ll recall, the ink didn’t bleed too much into the paper. It could probably be removed with judicious use of a bleaching agent. I imagine more than one gullible collector’s been tricked into buying it as an original.”
“But, Will, what about this copy?”
“This looks right to me, Meg,” I said, firmly looking directly at her. “Right age, right feel, right heft, right everything.” The faintest hint of dismay crossed her face and vanished.
When Sophie asked what it was worth, I realized that if ever there was a time for me to feign ignorance, rather than continuing to pour forth with all the lore about Tamerlane I had gathered during the past two weeks, this was that time. I realized I’d gone on too long about Cosey and facsimile editions. True, I already carried around a surfeit of bibliographic arcana in my memory, but these gentlemen with their three-name names, the Mabbotts and Clarks of history, not to mention their literary hero himself, would never have been so readily at my disposal had I not recently been immersed in all things Poe.
“Who knows?” I answered. “Small fortune.”
“Six figures?” she asked, the import of her discovery becoming clearer to her.
“At least,” I told her. “That said, I think Meg would agree that it needs to be carefully collated, photographed, and examined, not just by us but by outside experts after we’ve gone over it with a fine-tooth comb. I wouldn’t feel comfortable assigning it any value, even for insurance purposes, until we’ve done our due diligence.”
“Also,” Sophie continued, “we’ll need to think about how to go about properly presenting it to the world.”
“Maybe auction might be the best way to go,” I said, studying my wife, who looked at both our daughters, then at me with an uninterpretable expression on her face, arms crossed. “I think it’s the only real way to let the world decide what it’s finally worth. But it’s Meg’s call.”
Sophie pulled her long blue-black hair into an unruly ponytail on the top of her head, like a fountain of ink, adding, “If we price it and it moves too quickly, we’ll always be haunted by the fear we undersold it. Price it too high, the excitement of the find sinks into a slow-boil tar pit of grousing and grumbling by other dealers and collectors.”
Her point was well taken, though I knew that a private sale to an institution might be the simplest way to proceed, and by far the quietest. Price it strongly, then negotiate down to a figure all can agree on. I could easily think of a dozen candidates, places with means, that would love to have Tamerlane in their holdings.
Cal asked, “We have clear ownership of everything in this collection, right, Meg?”
As if startled from slumber, my wife responded, “What? Yes, we do. I don’t know whether you noticed when we were there, but the estate attorney insisted I sign a contract stipulating that the books were sold in their entirety and as is. Of course, he never expected one rarity might be hidden inside another.”
“Onus was on him, though,” said Sophie, snatching the words out of my mouth.
I knew it was the right moment for me to intervene. Accepting how events were supposed to unfold, if everyone involved here was to survive, I said, “Onus was really on both sides. If we’d gotten the books back here and realized the shop had grossly overpaid, it’s not like Meg could go running back to Tivoli demanding a refund. A done deal’s a done deal. But now, if nobody objects, I’d like to sit down and let’s examine this thing”—I remembered Slader’s admonishing me for using that word—“together.”