My friend the palaeographer, Andrea Boltresz of Armchair Adventures, Robertson, New South Wales, Australia, can from forty paces spot expensive forgeries. Take Anais Nin's-please! Even I (who know nothing about the field) felt that something was off, from ink-choice to umlaut-angle. She concurred: "Entirely the wrong type of pen, the capital F is incorrect and formed in the wrong order, the capital A has the tail going in the wrong direction and the loop is hesitant, the lower case 'a' has simply been formed backwards, there are numerous stops and starts throughout, the 's' is the wrong angle and should not have a kink in it like that, and you're dead right about the overall tone being too modern and chummy. She didn't sign like this."
I pressed her further: why would a well-known bookseller sell forgeries. Her answer stretches past the 450 words granted me, but she wrote, "You can see that they stopped and started from one line to the next, resulting in odd angles to the lines of text. Nin is a very emphatic signer with dead-straight lines, no hesitations, always very swift and neat. She also didn't inscribe except to people she knew or had some kind of connection to, so the inscriptions are generally quite personal (and few and far between)."
I mentioned previously that an Ur-text by the Benedictine monk, de Montfaucon, was concerned primarily with Greek scripts, but he gave the name to a broader field of study: "the science of studying ancient books." Fields take awhile to develop-osteopathy no less than Gender Studies. The institutional study of palaeography developed slowly, first with the work of Leopold Delisle and the Ecole des Chartes he founded in 1821 and then under the pioneering advancements of Ludwig Traub. Herr Traub took hand-written script to be evidence as to the plot and trajectory of any given book's history; he established a causal link between palaeography and Latin philology for the first time. This helped scholars to detect fraud and to establish provenance, the "back-story" of where a book came from, to whom it belonged and what the danged letters mean.
If the first point of palaeographic study is to establish at just what is one looking, palaeographers focus on two approaches: 1) morphology (the single letters and the graphic symbols, in fact, the entire basis for a typology of various scripts, hand-written or typed); and 2) ductus (pen-stroke analysis, or, I suppose, pencil-, finger-, or quill-, that is, the number, the order, and the direction of the strokes). Is the script, is the handwriting, set or constructed (that is, is it written with a flat, wide nib), or is it in cursive (with fewer lifts, potentially with lesser care). Further, is the script majuscule (two-line) or is it miniscule (four-line, with ascending strokes and descending strokes that reach above and below the other letters, respectively)?
My signed Grapes of Wrath is now priced to move at $275.
You can reach me at svafinebooks@gmail.com or at http://www.svafinebooks.com.
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