The difficulties involved in detecting twenty-first century forgeries of early modern books show that we are close to producing perfect forgeries. This talk will describe the history of faking print artifacts and the economic and cultural systems that make such forgeries possible. When did print first acquire the capacity adequately to represent reality? Under what conditions does it matter whether a printed object is materially genuine? What would happen were we to abandon our efforts to distinguish between the fake and the real book?
The Philipp Fehl Memorial Lecture

Hosted by:School of Architecture, School of Art + Design

In conjunction with: Art History Program, College of Law, Department of Astronomy, Department of History, Department of Religion, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Spurlock Museum