EXHIBIT: THE FAKES, LIES AND FORGERIES

The dozens of charlatans, schemers and impostors on display in "Fakes, Lies and Forgeries," an entertaining new exhibit running at the George Peabody Library, went to great lengths to conceal their guile, from concocting a bogus description of Jesus Christ to burying fake marble hieroglyphics that "proved" that Noah's ark beached in Italy.

In the age of Photoshop, James Frey and various forms of Internet chicanery, never has an exhibit on the fine art of lying been more timely. Now Baltimore is poised to become the epicenter of forgery studies internationally, thanks to a recent acquisition of what arguably is the world's largest collection of historically significant phony documents.

"It takes a lot of intellect, creativity and imagination to pull off a forgery," said Earle Havens, the library's curator of rare books and manuscripts and the exhibit's co-curator. "Forgery appeals to a fundamental aspect of human nature — our predilection to deceive. This is the naughty bits of history."

About 70 of the most famous literary and historical forgeries are on view, dating from roughly the 12th century to the middle of the 20th. Each of the flim-flam men who created them succeeded, at least for a time. A few changed history.

"Sometimes, the motivation for the forgeries was to do what we're doing now — talking about them 400 years later," Havens said. "If you can't get famous for the genius of your poetry, maybe you can get famous for being one of the best liars in the history of the world."

The exhibit, which runs through Feb. 1, is culled from a 1,700-item collection of literary and historical counterfeits and frauds amassed by a London couple over half a century. The Fakes, Lies and Forgeries," was partly sold and partly donated to the Johns Hopkins University in 2011 by Arthur and Janet Freeman.

Anthony Grafton, a history professor at Princeton University and the author of the book "Forgers and Critics," described the holdings as "the greatest collection of its kind in the world."

"There's nothing like it anywhere else," Grafton said.

"Great institutions like the British Library have lots of forgeries, but they're spread throughout the collection. Here, the books are together and they kind of talk to each other when you're working on them. In the future, anyone who's seriously interested in studying forgery will have to go to Baltimore."

Bata Kindai Amgoza Ibn LoBagola
Consider the case of the man who called himself "Bata Kindai Amgoza Ibn LoBagola" — in reality, Baltimore's own Joseph Howard Lee, an impoverished African-American gay man coping with a double whammy of discrimination at the turn of the 20th century.

So he decided to become someone else. In particular, LoBagola decided to become a black Jewish prince and self-proclaimed former savage who hailed from a remote part of Africa. Oh, and did LoBagola mention that he also was descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel?

In 1930, he persuaded a leading American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, to bring out his life story; a copy of that book is in the exhibit.

"He decided to emancipate himself," Havens said. "There's something very American about being rebellious and chafing against restriction."

Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
On display is a copy of the first German edition of the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," which claimed to reveal a Jewish conspiracy for world domination and which was used to justify the Holocaust. Though the inflammatory pamphlet was discredited almost immediately, it spread rapidly throughout Europe and America.

"It's an ugly story," Havens said, "a terrible, pernicious lie that caused the deaths of millions of people."

To read the complete article, see:
Exhibit of forgeries shows off unprecedented collection at Peabody Library (www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/arts/bs-ae-peabody-forgery-20141025-story.html)

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