Wise Books

In little England's 49 counties, 38,173,950 inhabitants, there are enough queer characters to people a small planet. Some of these oddities are rich, most of them are eminently respectable. Last fortnight, when the British Museum bought the Ashley Library, a posthumous footnote was added to the career of one of England's rich, respected, eccentric individuals. Thomas James Wise was not only the collector and owner of the world's finest private collection of English literature. He was a literary forger.

Son of a successful businessman, Collector Wise succumbed to the bibliophilic passion early, sometimes went without his supper to buy some treasurelet from a secondhand bookstall. As his London produce business prospered, Thomas James Wise bought more & more books, became known as Britain's foremost book collector and bibliographer. He was a friend of the late great Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad. He was frequently consulted as an authority on literary forgeries. Intimates smiled to each other about his harmless little habit of snitching lumps of sugar from cafe tables and hiding them away in a tin. At 74, dome-browed Thomas James Wise was considered by his knowledgeable countrymen as very nearly a great man.

That he was also very nearly a great crook appeared before his 75th birthday. In 1934 two younger British book experts, John Carter and Graham Pollard, published a book with the innocuous title, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets. It was a devastating investigation of an authoritative Wise catalog, proved up to the hilt that Thomas James Wise had for at least twelve years invented pedigrees for worthless books and pamphlets, passed off forgeries as genuine. Oldster Wise tried to bluster it out, finally retired in silence to his Hampstead house, lived secluded there until his death last May.

Forger or not, old Thomas Wise had done England more good than harm. His 7,000-volume library, whose catalog alone fills eleven large quartos, was offered to the nation at a price considerably less than its assessed quarter-million-pound value, in spite of a tempting U. S. offer of "any reasonable price." The Wise library contains first editions of nearly every famous English poet from the time of Spenser, in drama ranges from Gammer Gurton's Needle (1575) to Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln (1918). What the British Museum Library actually paid to get this sizable addition (biggest since 1846) was not divulged. Nothing official was said about the embarrassing subject, but it was unofficially felt that Thomas James Wise had paid his forger's debt in full.

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