Response

For this week, in addition to the “Making of a (Forged) Book” video, the Anatomy of a Book exercise, and the introduction to A Galileo Forgery: Unmasking the New York Sidereus Nuncius, I read Nicholas Schmidle’s New Yorker piece “A Very Rare Book,” Sean Richards’s “Between the Covers: Reflections of a Book Artist” in World Literature Today, Dwyer Murphy’s “A Visit to the Shadowy World of Rare Book Theft” on Literary Hub, and, all by Nick Wilding, a letter to the editor in Isis, and his reviews of the three volumes of Galileo’s O. Since we’re all on the same page, I thought I might skip the typical grad school response protocol of summarizing and just gloss over the details of the SNML controversy when relevant; I would instead like to focus on Nick Wilding’s reactions to the controversy.

Wilding’s review of A Galileo Forgery reads like the frustration of a person who spent years of his life shouting well-reasoned evidence against the authenticity of SNML from down Georgia State University way only to be ignored and left unacknowledged throughout and especially so in a grudging “nonapology” that is A Galileo Forgery, the third volume of Galileo’s O. It is perhaps the most entertaining book review I have read. Wilding was hoping, not for another review of the SNML, which had already been done in Galileo’s O 1 and 2, but for a review of those first two volumes themselves. For him, the central questions of the third volume should have been “under what conditions was it possible for such a clamorous error to have been made? Were the scientific tests correctly conceived or executed? Was the evidence well selected? Was the expertise in and between each discipline of a high enough standard?” These questions cut right to important issues of materiality. It is the (seventeenth-century) materiality of the text which makes it valuable, and thus worthy of scrutiny, in the first place. The materiality of the book defines the ways in which its value, both monetary and scholarly, might be determined. The materiality of the book makes physical scrutiny possible. The paper, ink, stamps, widths of the margins, the residues of age — the very properties of its physicality — are the subject of scrutiny, and the determinants of the procedures of scrutiny. They invite and necessitate forensic examination. And as with forensic science in criminology, the physicality of the research and laboratory setting create the seemingly incontrovertible illusion of “scientificality.”

The SNML created a controversy in forensic methods and in the hierarchy of scholarly reputation as much as in the antique book trade. Wilding makes a rousing call for the involvement of dealers, collectors, librarians, and criminals (and, from my perspective, even scholars at less historically venerable institutions like Georgia State) to participate in the process of authentication. Wilding insists that the illegitimacy of the SNML was made possible as much by the cloistered elitism of Bredekamp as the nefariousness of Massimo De Caro. Had other stakeholders been allowed in the process, the forgery would have been detected much more rapidly and with much less fanfare. I think this lesson is applicable on a much larger scale than book forgery. Wilding calls these problems “local cults of academic elitism.” He calls for, what might be “perhaps an unhelpful tautology,” “adequate contextualization” when he says that the “dictum of historians of science that knowledge is socially embedded is prescriptive as well as descriptive.” I call it “meta-analysis.” In their attempt to authenticate the SNML, some historians of science lacked the introspection and self-reflection to consider that their own scientific undertaking might itself have been socially-constructed. The irony is accentuated by all of the times we have argued for the social constructivism of Galileo’s own work.

Now to infuse a brief bit of controversy of my own into the subject: I am curious as to why none of the players involved felt it necessary to demonstrate the scholarly value of SNML. I am not suggesting there would not have been any added value, if it were authentic. What I notice, however, is that this book was initially imparted value not by scholars for scholarly reasons, but by collectors for pecuniary reasons. It seems initial interest in the book was driven by the fetishization of the old, and a hierarchy of particular individuals within that fetish. (I do not mean this pejoratively; as an historian and bibliophile, I fetishize the old as much as the next person). But the insistence that the appearance of a heretofore unknown book is more arousing if that book be by Galileo is predicated on the assumption that the contributions of some personages to science are necessarily more valuable than those of others. This is a common assumption in our field, if an increasingly contentious one. It is not one I myself uphold. But it has a cultural logic of its own and if we are going to infuse those priorities into our work then we must be ready to take account of them, and reconcile them with our overarching narratives. The point is this: the scale of the SNML controversy was made possible by the a priori assumption of both scholars and collectors that a newly discovered Galileo is more important than a newly discovered work by most anyone else. I can stomach this assumption from the collectors. They have a strong financial incentive to prioritize the heroes of historians’ of science stories — they generate more excitement in buyers and sell for higher at auction. This ties into the materiality of the book. The text of the Sidereus Nuncius itself, thanks to those same tech entrepreneurs who shark and spike the antique book market, has no monetary value whatsoever — I can find it for free online in a matter of seconds — it is the physicality of book, binding, paper, and all, that imparts value on a copy of SN, specifically, if that material stuff was made and assembled in the time of the author and touched by the author. I understand the enchantment and allure of this palpable connection to the past, the physical embodiment of Galileo as a corporeal being in the form of an object he crafted. The spiritual impact of this connection for both scholars and collectors is invaluable. What is less clear to me, and what provokes larger questions about the priorities of the history of science, is what the SNML would have contributed to scholarship had it been authentic. Perhaps a great many things but they were more assumed than explained in the reading I did and I think the reasons need to be interrogated.

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Notes

Nick Wilding – Reviews of “A Comparison of the Proof Copy (New York) with Other Paradigmatic Copies by Bruckle, Hahn and Bredekamp; Venice 1610 by Needham and Bredekamp

• 217 – “Needham shows the importance of Galileo’s strangely understudied full draft and incomplete fair copy manuscripts, the iconic observation notes of Jupiter’s satellites, and various other unnoticed fragments, which are interrogated and integrated to produce a convincing and novel account of Galileo’s activities early in 1610.”
  • Fair copy”?
• 218 – “Here are just a few of his new findings: originally printed with surprisingly wide margins, most copies were harshly trimmed, usually losing a star or two in the process; Galileo, facing tight word restrictions, edited out a statement unequivocally backing literal Copernicanism in his conclusion; a fine-paper issue received standardized autograph corrections; the number of lunar illustrations was cut as the book progressed.”
  • “Losing a star”?
  • For “word restrictions,” of all the sentences in the book he decided to excise a literal support of Copernicanism?
  • “Fine-paper issue”?
• “Its paper stock differs slightly from all other copies, and it was printed on half-sheets and on a different press.”
  • Are there other examples of this in a proof copy
• How reliable is the signature is an indicator of anything?

 

Nick Wilding – Letter to the Editor – Isis 103 : 4

• 760 – Transformations in the technologies of photomechanical reproduction and digital editing, coupled with unprecedented access to high-quality images of rare books, make it cheap and easy to produce excellent individualized fakes. This issue is perhaps more pressing in the history of science than elsewhere, as dot-com collectors invest heavily in the field, push prices up, and isolate such objects from easy access by scholars.”
• “As training in the technical aspects of book history and paleography recedes, our profession needs to establish new conversations: historians, librarians, dealers, collectors, printers, and technical engineers have to share more information and hold frank discussions about the limits of the possible in contemporary forgery. Otherwise we won’t know what we’re talking about.”

 

Nick Wilding – Review of A Galileo Forgery: Unmasking the New York Sidereus Nuncius Sidereus Nuncius by Needham, Bredekamp, and Bruckle

• 1338 – “What happens when senior academics are told that they object they have spent years authenticating and researching is, in fact, a fake? I ask the indelicate question not to elicit yet another round of schadenfreude, but to encourage discussion on the best course of action, both political and ethical, in academic disputes.”
• “. . . A Galileo Forgery, volume 3 of Galileo’s O, described by the publishers, presumably without irony, as ‘perhaps without peer in the history of the book.’”

 

• “Central to Needham’s position is the recognition that historical research, even descriptive bibliography, is always hypothetical in nature, and that fresh conversations and contexts might absolutely overturn an object’s ontological status.”

 

• “For reasons I cannot determine, the chapter describing our joint evidence, which in itself provides certain proof of the forgery, is called ‘Fruitful Doubts,’ as though bumbling amateurs had happened upon evidence whose true meaning might only be divined by the professionals. In fact, as the strange trajectory of the rest of the volume shows, what was really needed from the original team was not so much a reanalysis of SNML, but one of Galileo’s O 1 and 2.”

 

• “The central question should surely have been, for all those involved in the initial study: under what conditions was it possible for such a clamorous error to have been made? Were the scientific tests correctly conceived or executed? Was the evidence well selected? Was the expertise in and between each discipline of a high enough standard? In each case, though the volume does its best to avoid such direct introspection, the answer is no.”

 

• “Bredekamp’s disappointing response is not to investigate and critique his own technique, but to defensively claim that the forgery was so good, even he was fooled. This position is not without repercussions. In order to protect his reputation, the status of the forgery has to be raised. Yet, as Needham argues, the forgery is simply not that clever: we are not dealing with uncanny doppelgangers or perfect replicants, just one of several (at least a dozen) attempts to forge well enough to get by. SNML is not a masterpiece, but merely the most hardheaded example yet detected of a series of highly individuated facsimiles produced in order to pass local tests. Only some of these forgeries were destined for the open market: their primary function was to substitute for stolen copies.”
  • I want to talk about the travesty of this blight forever being associated in name with Martayan Lan, who seems from what I’ve read to have done what he could to prevent this, instigate and cooperate with an investigation into its provenance, and make reparations.
• 1338-9 – “The deeper issue is whether academic study is to be conceived as a lofty communion between experts and elevated, discrete, isolated material objects, or a socially engaged conversation with other ways of knowing.”
• 1339 – “It was precisely because dealers, collectors, librarians, and criminals were left out of these conversation that the real nature of the object’s production and meaning was missed.”
  • To what extent is this applicable to all scholarly conversations?

 

• “Adequate contextualization is perhaps an unhelpful tautology, but the dictum of historians of science that knowledge is socially embedded is prescriptive as well as descriptive. Local cults of academic elitism are perhaps to blame here, and certainly erected barriers in this particular story that prevented early warnings (and there were many) from being taken seriously.”

 

• “Why the rush to produce such a flawed and mumbled nonapology? The answer seems to lie in the politics of German academia rather than a genuine interest in transparency.”
• Some of the most striking claims in the volume concern the status of scientific tests undertaken for the earlier volumes: paper analysis, for example, now shows that SNML is printed on modern paper, with cotton fibers clearly visible. What, then, were all the graphs and microscopic images doing in volume 1?”
  • This gets to the heart of my interest here: the fickle force of material, to both confirm the legitimacy of a material object and to betray it.
• “This is probably the most damning statement in the volume, an admission that the science of the first two volumes was not actually to test anything, but just to appear scientific, to authenticate with the shimmering aura of the scientific image. Given that Bredekamp’s current goal is to explore the relationship between the scientific image and thought, this is an extraordinary strategy.”
  • I think this may go too far. I haven’t read Galileo’s O, but their failure to perform one scientific test does not render all the tests they did conduct nothing but a “shimmering aura”
  • To what extent is this a controversy of science, and not just of the antique book trade, or the history of science, or renaissance studies?
• “In fact, one of the recurrent findings of this volume is that scientific tests on the ink and paper are generally inconclusive. Moreover, even though this was not the procedure deployed by the forgers, it is argued that recycling genuine paper into correctly watermarked new paper would probably pass all known tests. This is one of the volume’s most interesting contributions, its tacit admission that what the forgery has exposed is not so much its own status, but also the limits of expertise. Are we, then, at a methodological impasse, where forgeries are unidentifiable?”
• 1340 – “More serious was the refusal to acknowledge the potential importance of the identification of three forged copies of the Compasso in 2006 by Owen Gingerich, two of which were also studied by J. Franklin Mowery. Unless something changes in the way academics work with each other and the rare book trade, all this will happen again.”

 

• “Needham accuses himself of ‘unconscious collaboration in forgery,’ and there is a sense in which the proof-copy argument forgave SNML its many sins and obscured the possibility of it being considered a fake. But the more profound socioepistemological error lay in constructing a team around Bredekamp, who had already formed and published his conclusions elsewhere: objectivity was already not so much lost, as owned. A forgery differs from a facsimile not in its mode of production, but in its mode of reception.”