Seven Books That Even Their Authors Don’t Recognize

by Paul Collins

For an editor, dead authors are notably easier to work with than living ones. This probably explains why, in 1731, the London printer Thomas Astley was able to coax a most unusual seventy-four-page tract out of Sir Isaac Newton: Tables for Renewing and Purchasing Leases of Cathedral Churches and Colleges. Since he’d already been dead for four years, it mattered little that Newton was not in the habit of writing lease-calculators: what mattered was that his name could sell any math-related title, and that Sir Isaac was in no position to lodge a complaint about it.

Formally known as allonymic literature, books that steal the names of famous authors are as old as the pursuit of profit in publishing—which is to say, they are probably as old as literature itself. I’ve found, for instance, that a pretty consistent one in six antiquarian copies of Aristotle are not, in fact, by Aristotle at all: they are variants of Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a 1684 sex guide published illicitly in contraband editions up through the twentieth century.

Rarest of all—the truffle of this underground of literary fungi—is the living allonym, the book that steals the name of an author who is still very much alive. The motive is always profit, and the results are always entertaining—if not for these unfortunate authors.

William Shakespeare
The Yorkshire Tragedy (1608)
The tale of a vicious gambler who murders his family, The Yorkshire Tragedy capitalized upon the infamous case of Walter Calverley, who was pressed to death under stones in 1605 for murdering his two sons and wounding his wife. The play, though suitably gory—“I’ll kiss the blood I spilt and then I go: My soul is bloodied, well may my lips be so”—is probably by Thomas Middleton, despite the publisher’s canny use of Shakespeare’s name on the title page. The ploy was convincing enough that even the editors of Shakespeare’s Third Folio of 1663/64 included the play as genuine. Shakespeare was pestered by dozens of other counterfeit attributions during his lifetime, including a bogus poetry volume, The Passionate Pilgrim, issued by London printer William Jaggard in 1599. Despite pirating other editions of Shakespeare, Jaggard landed the printing job for the First Folio of 1623.

Thomas Paine
Tom Paine’s Jests: Being an Entirely New and Select Collection of Patriotick Bon Mots, Repartees, Anecdotes, Epigrams, Observations, &c. on Political Subjects (1793)
Sold for sixpence in London, this chapbook was not exactly the literary crime of the eighteenth century. It maintains the pretence of authorship for precisely one page—the title page—before clumsily referring to Paine in the third person throughout its preface. There are scarcely a half dozen references...