Harvard University

Why did a Harvard librarian cut up a book?

Kelly Rene Bullard, Assistant Curator of Printing & Graphic Arts at Harvard's Houghton Library, tells the story of how one of Harvard's early curators helped catch a literary forger. Flora Livingston was the curator for the Harry Elkins Widener Room at Harvard University from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s. She was a well-respected librarian and bibliographer who helped shape Harvard's libraries. Her friendship with John Carter, a book detective and fellow researcher, led to her involvement in an investigation into Thomas J. Wise, a scholar and suspected forger. John Carter and his partner Graham Pollard suspected that Wise was forging literary publications using the names of famous authors. One of the texts they suspected was fake was the 1986 "Sonnets" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Unable to get their hands on a copy in England, they wrote to Flora Livingston in the United States to see if she would be willing to investigate the copy of the "Sonnets" in the Widener collection.