📚 Forgeries

Fake masterpieces and the experts fooled: Han van Meegeren’s verdict-proof forgeries to the scientific connoisseurs.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject forgeries in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The scholar adventurers	Richard Daniel Altick	1656	20
	The gentle art of faking	Riccardo Nobili	1922	13
	Notes and emendations to the text of Shakespeare's plays	John Payne Collier	1852	11
	Miscellaneous papers and legal instruments under the hand and seal of William Shakespeare	William Henry Ireland	1796	10
	Confessions	William Henry Ireland	1805	10
	Of queens' gardens	John Ruskin	1880	9
	Scientific Investigation of Copies, Fakes and Forgeries	Paul Craddock	2008	9
	Seven lectures on Shakespeare and Milton	Samuel Taylor Coleridge	1856	7
	The great Shakespeare forgery	Bernard D. N. Grebanier	1965	7
	Caveat emptor	Ken Perenyi	2012	7
	A Sequel to An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain XIXth Century Pamphlets by John Carter and Graham Pollard	Nicolas Barker	1934	6
	Fakes	Kurz, Otto	1948	6
	How to disappear completely and never be found	Doug Richmond	1986	6
	Shakspere forgeries in the Revels accounts	Samuel Aaron Tannenbaum	1928	5
	Practise to Deceive	George Bradshaw	1961	5
	Fake? The Art of Deception	Mark Jones	1990	5
	Can You Ever Forgive Me?	Lee Israel	2008	5
	Agatha	George Eliot	1869	4
	The gentle art of faking furniture	Herbert Cescinsky	1931	4
	The forgeries of Tennyson's plays	John Carter	1967	4
	Three Picassos before breakfast	Anne-Marie Stein	1973	4
	Reborn in the U.S.A	Trent Sands	1990	4
	Violin fraud	Brian W. Harvey	1992	4
	The art forger's handbook	Eric Hebborn	1997	4
	The commissar vanishes	King, David	1997	4
	Antique trader guide to fakes & reproductions	Mark Chervenka	2001	4
	The poet and the murderer	Simon Worrall	2002	4
	I Was Vermeer	Frank Wynne	2006	4
	Curiosities of modern Shaksperian criticism	James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps	1853	3
	Le truquage	Paul Eudel	1884	3

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

ForgivenessFossilsFractalsFree EnterpriseFreemasonryFrench

Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.