How can you avoid buying a forged document or autograph? Initial assessments often consider these questions:
- Does the signature look natural?
- Is the handwriting shaky or hesitant?
- How does the spacing between letters and words compare to authentic examples of the autograph?
Listen to Nathan Raab discuss forgery avoidance techniques and more on the forgery episode of Inspired by History:
In authenticating historical documents, as with any other trade or skill, the best asset one has is experience. This is why working with someone who has genuine experience and qualifications is a must, and why a go-it-alone approach for the newcomer is a failure from the start. Would you perform your own surgery? But here are some general tips to help you start your educational process.
One of the first steps in historical document authentication is simply, does it look right and natural? Sign your own name a few times and look at other things your friends or relatives have signed. The signatures might be illegible, but they will all have a flow to them. The letters will not be lumpy or odd shaped (in a way no one would naturally write them), nor look labored or as if they were drawn with care. Signatures that look drawn or just unnatural should be avoided.
Then check for inappropriate irregularities in the writing. Shakiness is one of the surest signs of a forgery. There is no reason for a person’s signature to be shaky unless he is suffering from Parkinson’s or another debilitating disease (like Stephen Hopkins and, late in life, John Hancock) or is greatly advanced in age (like John Quincy Adams in the 1840s). If a signature looks even a bit shaky, it may be a sign of advancing age or illness but beware.
Next check for signature breaks and hesitations. Sign your name a number of times. Almost certainly, you signed smoothly each time (without stopping to take stock in the middle of writing any signature), left spaces or breaks between your letters and words in the same places every time, and stopped or trailed off in the same way. It’s no different with a famous person. So watch out for hesitations anywhere within the writing. As for breaks, they should generally be at the same places in multiple examples, and thus should be consistent with the authentic samples you are using for comparison. Most people break between their first and last names, and some break within the individual words (Franklin Roosevelt’s autograph seems like nothing but a series of unlikely breaks between the letters).
An experiment will show you how important breaks are to historical document analysis. Sign your name a few more times. Then try breaking your signature in a few unusual places. Hard to do, and surely not something you would do sometimes and not others. Yet it is necessary to note that there are a few exceptions – people who are consistent in having certain predictable, inconsistent breaks as part of their signature pattern (FDR again affords a fine example as he sometimes joined the “s” to the “e” in Roosevelt and sometimes did not). Endings also provide useful information. Andrew Jackson always seemed to end his signature with a flourish, while Lyndon Johnson preferred a line stretching off quite a distance. Most people have some smooth final touch. The forger, needing to be careful, often stops rather abruptly or awkwardly at the end of the signature he is forging.
It’s important to note that the autograph, or signature, is but one element in assessing a document’s authenticity. The overall context is the most important, and this entails many other considerations, including: the size of the paper, the ink, the person it’s being written to, if it’s a known letter, and if the handwriting is consistent with the handwriting in that period. (Particularly in the early years, they knew how to write in straight lines.)
The provenance of the document is another criterion to consider, but there are caveats there, too.
Case Study: Forged Lincoln Letter
About a decade ago, Raab assessed a Lincoln letter being sold by a book dealer that seemed to have excellent provenance. An important collector and scholar earlier in the century had published it and declared it genuine. The signature looked convincing, too. Yet, we believed something was wrong with it. “The more I looked at the letter, the more I just felt uncomfortable with it,” said Nathan Raab. “It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on. It was more, when you’ve been doing this for long enough, it becomes an initial gut feeling that you get sort of a queasy feeling in your stomach that this isn’t right.”
The uneven lines and the overall sloping nature of the handwriting were the primary markers of what we ultimately determined was the work of an unknown forger. To learn more about how this unfolded, read Nathan Raab’s book, The Hunt for History.