re: #275 Dr Lizardo

With regard to Hofman, from what I gather, it’s entirely possible that some of his forgeries are still floating around there. By all accounts, he was one of the best forgers ever.

Over a decade after the Hofmann murders, it came out that a “discovered” Dickinson poem was a Hofmann forgery. Here’s a story about the poem from 2000:

theguardian.com

There’s also a book called “The Poet and the Murderer” by Simon Worrall.

At the time of the murders, Hofmann was trying to sell a forged copy of a most rare document, called “Oath of a Freeman.” Unlike the other documents he forged, which were handwritten, this was an attempt to forge a printed document. Hofmann was such a clever forger, new techniques to discover forgeries had to be developed for him. Among other things, the inks used by Hofmann were iron gall, but had a particular alligatoring pattern that would not have been detectable except under a microscope. I also remember that Hofmann apparently hung up his forgeries to dry, which caused the ink to flow certain ways with gravity. Had Hofmann not been so greedy, he might still be doing it.