Just as it 'takes a thief to catch a thief, ' so the forger greatly aids the search for historical truth, maintains Anthony Grafton in this wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship. Labeling forgery the 'criminal sibling' of criticism, he describes a panorama of remarkable individuals---forgers, from classical Greece through the recent past, who produced a variety of splendid triumphs of learning and style, and scholarly detectives, who honed the tools of scholarship in attempts to unmask these skillful fakers.

Anthony Grafton
With a foreword by Ann Blair and a new afterword by the author