Forgeries

Euripides in the Vatican It was the development of print which enabled us to start to think about the possibility of there being genuine and fake books, and to wish for accurate rather than inaccurate ones. Before that any hand-written book was just a hand-written book: it made no claim to authority over and above any other hand-written copy. Indeed many a manuscript volume contains parts of several works. People must have assumed copying error when they encountered discrepancies, and been quite tolerant in their recognition that one could never know precisely what the author had written. When a book could be set in type and multiple copies printed from that metal it became possible to rely on the “correctness” (or not) of the edition. This belief in the authority of print took some time to establish. Early printing involved quite a lot of time, and during the course of printing authors might turn up and make changes, so that the second half of the run ended up different from the…