Transferred from Bao Bo. com:
Fake books in ancient books are usually divided into three categories: the first category is the version of ancient books forged by merchants for profit; The second category is the books written by the author in the name of the ancients; The third category is the wrong edition of previous collectors and writers.
Ancient books not only have academic research value, but also are increasingly cherished by researchers, especially collectors. Because they have been circulated for a long time, they are rare now, leading to rising market prices. Due to the stimulation of profiteering, some businessmen forget their righteousness when they are greedy, and use various fraudulent means to make fakes, so as to confuse the real with the fake. Due to the appearance of various fake versions, many artificial obstacles have been added to the identification of ancient books. Of course, from another perspective, it can also promote the ability of appraisers and forgers to fight with each other.
First, the purpose of counterfeiting: to identify counterfeit goods, we must first understand the purpose of counterfeiting, so as to make targeted analysis, comparison and identification. There are three main purposes for making fakes of ancient books.
1. The purpose of counterfeiting is to make a profit. As long as it is profitable, they can use various means to forge various versions of ancient books with low value, such as year, author's name, collector's name, inscription, seal and so on.
2. Some authors write books under the guise of the ancients, the main purpose is to improve the authority and mystery of books, or for some reason they don't want to be named. Therefore, most of these ancient books are fake only by famous masterpieces, and they are not forged.
3. Collectors and cataloguers make mistakes in editions, mostly because of their poor knowledge and eyesight. Therefore, for this kind of descriptive books, we can only make false references and should not blindly believe them.
Two, there are many methods of fraud, appraisers should pay attention to the following main types in practical work.
1. Paper is old: paper is the carrier of words. Without paper, there would be no books. Therefore, to judge the authenticity of ancient books, we must first look at whether the paper is outdated. Therefore, to make imitations of ancient books, the paper must be old. There are two kinds of old paper: one is "dyeing paper", including using sugar color, or boiling water with chestnuts, or boiling water with chestnuts shells, or using tea leaves, or using ochre-gamboge water to dye the paper yellow, or using cigarettes to smoke the water yellow, in order to make the paper look older; The second is to use "old paper for new printing". If the counterfeiters have ancient paper, they can print the contents on ancient paper and bind them into "ancient books". This kind of fraud means less, but it is difficult to distinguish it from paper.
2. Forged Preface and Postscript: In some reprinted versions, in addition to the preface and postscript of the original book, new prefaces and postscripts are added to explain the reasons for reprinting, and the name, year and month are also written after the prefaces and postscripts. All these show the true age of books. Forgers often cut off the prefaces and postscripts that are not conducive to their forgery, or change their dates, and some forged prefaces and postscripts are beneficial to their forgery.
3. Forge card records: keep old card records, dig out duplicate card records, or dig out or alter the age of duplicate card records.
4. Forge celebrity inscriptions and hide seals.
5. Cut the table of contents: cut off part or all of the original table of contents, so that people don't know how many volumes there are in the whole book, and make the residual book as the whole book.
6. Use descriptive books: Some descriptive books are wrong, and counterfeiters deliberately use them as a basis to sell fakes. In a word, there are various methods of counterfeiting, sometimes only one or two, and sometimes it may be a combination of many methods. In the actual appraisal, appraisers should use their own knowledge and related materials to conduct a comprehensive inspection of the books being appraised, and pay attention to eliminating the false and retaining the true, so as to make a correct conclusion.