"In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy "an enormous collection of fake stuff." The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, comprised over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries - beautifully bound manuscripts carrying black ink annotations allegedly penned by Shakespeare; works written by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets;"
"It was an unusual task for a scholar dedicated to studying the truth, but Havens was adamant. "We have never before needed a collection like this more than we need it right now," he told the Dean of Libraries at the time. The internet and the increasing popularity of social media were changing how information was written, disseminated, and consumed, giving rise to the phenomenon of fake news as we now know it."
Bibliotheca Fictiva contains over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries. The collection includes manuscripts falsely attributed to figures such as Shakespeare, purported works by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets, and fabricated poems attributed to priests and theologians. Johns Hopkins acquired and housed the collection at the Evergreen Museum and Library to provide resources for studying misinformation. The collection was assembled by antiquarian booksellers Arthur and Janet Freeman. The Freemans began collecting literary forgeries in 1961 when Arthur Freeman, then a graduate student of Elizabethan drama, started acquiring sources on John Payne Collier.
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