As an antiquarian bookseller, and a former academic, Arthur Freeman has collected rare books and manuscripts for more than fifty years. Starting on a shoestring budget as a graduate student at Harvard, where he also entered the antiquarian book trade as co-founder of Ximenes Rare Books in 1961, Arthur began to collect for himself, generally in the area of his academic specialty, Elizabethan drama, focusing in particular on the long career of the nineteenth-century English scholar-forger John Payne Collier an interest later revived through close collaboration with Arthurs wife, co-author, and business partner Janet Ing Freeman. Together they completed, after twenty more years of collecting and research, a two-volume, 1500-page bio-bibliography of Collier, published by the Yale University Press in 2004. This was awarded the prestigious International Bibliography Prize of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers for the years 2002-2006, and remains the authoritative account of that controversial figure.

In the process of assembling and exploiting their Collier collection, they also widened their scope and began to collect all forms of literary forgery they could reasonably identify. The Freemans constructed their own canons of inclusion, defining practical limits--as, for example, where traditional pseudepigraphy might border on deliberate and tendentious misattribution, or where true narrative impostures converge on conventional fiction, or whimsical hoaxes give way to immediate disclaimer.

Ultimately they settled on a plan to collect the entire range of literary forgery from approximately 600 B.C. to the end of the twentieth century. Among these were specimens of the more conventional physical forgeries faked printings, falsified provenance or autograph manuscript annotation, and the like but the emphasis always lay on the deceptive creation of spurious text and fictive record, and the history of their investigation, discreditation, and/or pernicious survival, even into present-day controversy.

written by Earle Havens, Curator of Rare Books