Only later would it become clear that just as Ms. Brooks was asking the world to believe that such cases of malpractice were isolated, not systemic, Sotheby’s was being shaken by allegations that its chairman, Alfred Taubman, had negotiated a commission fixing deal, with Christie’s in London. Those charges led to Ms. Brooks’s resignation and charges of fraud and malpractice being leveled against Taubman, for which he would face a possible term in jail.
Taubman’s attempt to fix commission fees was motivated by naked greed. By the mid-nineties Sotheby’s – and Christie’s – had turned what in the eighteenth century was regarded as a rather grubby and dishonorable trade into a multibillion-dollar industry. Like owning a Porsche or a house in the Hamptons, raising a paddle at an auction had come to be regarded as an essential rite de passage of the very rich. And as the longest bull market in history began its vertiginous climb, prices went through the roof. In 1996 a pretty enough, but not great, John Singer Sargent painting called ‘Cashmere’ sold in New York for $11.1 million. In the same year a sculpture by a minor French artist, titled ‘Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans,’ sold for $11.9 million.
The rare books and manuscripts department is the poor cousin at Sotheby’s. The big money is in fine art and jewels. Rare books and manuscripts also take a long time to catalog. As a result there is enormous pressure to turn over as much volume as possible. ‘Everything is hype these days,’ said Justin Schiller, a well-known dealer of antiquarian books. ‘In the old days you would collect things with true value. Today people don’t know what to collect, so you have things like Diana’s dresses selling for $250,000 or a Honus Wagner baseball card for $500,000. It’s not what the auction houses are making on these things. The real value is in the publicity.’ Splashy, one-of-a-kind items like an unpublished Emily Dickinson poem are worth far more than the commission. They generate headlines. And bring in the punters.
The hunger for hype, combined with a captive clientele, has created the perfect environment for what Samuel T. Coleridge called, in a different context, the willing suspension of disbelief. This operates just as powerfully with the purchaser.
‘There is an incredible desire on the part of people to believe that something they have purchased is real,’ Jennifer Larson said. ‘It is what you think you have and want to believe you have – not what you really have – that matters.’
Mark Hofmann knew this too. He once said of his Mormon forgeries that they were documents he felt could have been part of Mormon history. He also said that deceiving people gave him a feeling of power. More than greed, this hunger for power – the power to shape and change history – seems to be ultimately what drove him. His forgeries found willing buyers because they told stories people wanted to hear.
The auction houses also tell stories, in the form of the narratives they publish in their catalogs. The most appealing stories of all have an element of mystery and romance: like the elderly woman who cuts the back off an old picture frame and finds a John Singer Sargent painting; or the bank clerk who stumbles on a priceless Washington letter while leafing through a dusty archive during her lunch break. The public loves these stories as they love stories of buried treasure. They appeal to the side of us that wants to believe in Lady Luck, in coincidence, and serendipity.
Facts that might take away from the attractiveness of a painting or manuscript, raise suspicions about its authenticity, or comprise the owner’s desire for anonymity, are carefully excised from the stories that the auction houses tell. The catalog for the auction at which the Emily Dickinson poem was sold, for instance, cited august individuals and institutions like Randolph Hearst as consignees. It did not mention the Gallery of History in Las Vegas.
Something similar had already happened. When Hofmann was arrested in 1985, his possessions were seized to pay off his creditors. Hofmann was not just a forger. He was also a serious book collector. And when police raided his house in Salt Lake City, they found a magnificent collection of antiquarian children’s books. The person chosen to dispose of Hofmann’s children’s books was a book dealer in California named Mark Hime. From him the books found their way to a well-known New York collector by the name of Richard Manney. A few years later Manney consigned his collection to Sotheby’s for sale.
The books appeared in Sotheby’s October 11, 1991, catalog as the Richard Manney Library. Detailed provenance was given to reinforce the importance and legitimacy of the collection. But one name was missing: Mark Hofmann’s.
These were not the first Hofmann items that Sotheby’s had sold either. In October 1985, only two weeks after he was arrested for murder, a Daniel Boone letter, supposedly written during the Indian Wars in Kentucky, was put under the hammer for $31,900. It came with a wonderful story of Boone’s heroism on the American frontier. But the manuscript was consigned by a Salt Lake City businessman named Kenneth Woolley, who had in turn bought it from his cousin, Mark Hofmann. If anyone had looked closely they might also have noticed that the letter was dated April 1.
Ken Farnsworth, one of two lead investigators for the Salt Lake City DA’s office, had called Sotheby’s at the time, to warn them about the Boone document. Hofmann was already behind bars. But having seen numerous lives shattered by Hofman’s forgeries, Farnsworth was determined to get as many of them as he could off the market. He contacted antiquarian book dealers all over America. He contacted the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society. He visited the British Library. He even went to Paris and alerted one of France’s leading historical documents dealers.
All these institutions were extremely cooperative. But when he contacted Sotheby’s he was met with a wall of silence. At first he was told that the auction house would provide the name and address of the consignee of the Boone letter if he (Farnsworth) provided a written account of his findings. When he forwarded a letter detailing his suspicions, he was told that Sotheby’s would only comply with a subpoena from a court. Mike George, another Salt Lake City investigator who worked on the Hofmann case, remembers similar problems. ‘At Sotheby’s we were met with “Don’t want to talk to you, don’t care what you have to say.”’
One person did care, it seems. Mary Jo Kline, the Sotheby’s employee who handled the sale of the Boone letter, informed the head of the the rare books and manuscripts department that in the future she would never again catalog anything that had passed through Hofmann’s hands. Her boss acquiesced and, as far as Kline was concerned, agreed to a larger policy decision: never to handle anything with Hofmann provenance. Three years after that, in a move that shocked the closely knit historical documents world, Kline’s boss thanked her for her pains by terminating her. His name was David Redden. Redden was still at the helm twelve years later when, a month before Sotheby’s auctioned the Dickinson poem, they advertised two other Hofmann forgeries in their May 1997 catalog. One was a minor Daniel Boone autograph. The other was a sensational item: a Reward of Merit, ‘one of only three ever discovered,’ signed by Nathan Hale.
When he saw the Hale document in the catalog, Brent Ashworth, who would later alert them to a possible Hofmann connection with the Dickinson poem, called Selby Kiffer and told him that he had seen the Hale manuscript in one of Todd Axelrod’s stores and believed it was also a Hofmann forgery. As he would a month later with the Dickinson poem, Kiffer denied that the document came from Las Vegas. He seemed to have taken Ashworth’s warnings seriously, though, for on May 2 Kimball Higgs contacted Jennifer Larson by fax. ‘Here are two lots that Brent [Ashworth] brought to our attention as possible MH [Mark Hofmann] originals. He felt sure about the Hale and less positive about the Boone. If you have an opinion we would love to hear it.’
Larson faxed back a raft of documentation. The first item read: ‘Appears on Mark Hofmann’s holographic list, “Forged Non-Mormon Autographs.”’ This was the list found in Hofmann’s prison cell in Draper, Utah, in 1988.
Both Daniel Boone and Nathan Hale were on the list. So was Emily Dickinson. Sotheby’s withdrew the Boone document but kept the far more valuable Hale autograph in the auction. It was put under