About

I write about how textual truth gets manufactured, and about the people and institutions that have done the manufacturing.

My subject is the history of textual criticism, critical bibliography, antiquarian scholarship, forgery, and the administration of archives and institutional libraries. These look like four subjects and are really one. An edited text is the product of a chain of custody: somebody had to acquire the manuscript, somebody had to decide it was genuine, somebody had to choose a copy-text, somebody had to emend it, and somebody had to keep the result on a shelf where the next scholar could find it. Every link in that chain is a human institution, shaped by rivalry, ambition, prejudice, money, friendship, politics, and the accidents of survival.

The methods those people developed are indispensable. They are also, taken together, a rhetoric—a genre with its own conventions, its own orthodoxies, and its own recurring quarrels. Editors and antiquaries are a quarrelsome bunch. They arrogate over one another while committing the very errors they accuse each other of. Their disputes are enormously diverting, and they are also the mechanism by which the documentary record was settled.

The English case, mostly, from the first Society of Antiquaries in the 1580s to the exposure of Thomas J. Wise’s forgeries in the 1930s. The institutions recur: the College of Arms, the Society of Antiquaries, the Stationers’ Company, the State Paper Office, the Public Record Office, the British Museum Library. So do the characters—William Camden, Robert Cotton, John Aubrey, Richard Bentley, Alexander Pope, Thomas Percy, Edmond Malone, Joseph Ritson, John Payne Collier, F. J. Furnivall, W. W. Greg.

Forgery is not a detour from this history but a part of it. Macpherson, Chatterton, Ireland, Collier and Wise are not simply criminals against scholarship; they are scholarship’s shadow, working the same materials by the same methods toward different ends. The line between conjectural emendation and fabrication is a good deal thinner than the discipline likes to admit, and where exactly it falls is one of the questions I keep returning to.

I have spent the last three years researching weekly at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library. The Berg Collection holds a substantial body of Thomas J. Wise material—his forgeries, presentation copies of his bibliographies, and the papers of the modern English authors whose market he largely created. Material bearing on Wise’s accomplices Harry Buxton Forman and Edmund Gosse runs across both the Berg and the Pforzheimer Collections.

The library is not only a place where the research is done; it is part of the subject. An archive mediates our experience of the past through its policies of access and its mechanisms of textual control. That is as true of a reading room in 2026 as it was of Cotton’s library in 1629, when the Privy Council closed it and set a guard on the door.

I build my own tools, and I build them so that their workings can be inspected. The projects page describes them: a card-catalogue digitisation pipeline that records who read each card and how far to trust them, a simulation of hand-press composition that grades bibliographical method against a truth it actually knows, and the publishing system that sets this site and its essays from a single source.

That is not incidental to the writing. A book about chains of editorial custody ought to be able to account for its own.