Signature/Autograph Database?

I must hold the largest collection of signature samples in on 'off line' database... I have samples over 1500 Tolkien autograhs and from early to late signatures. I have made it for my own use and also because I was studying the subject. It was my initial idea to publish a large article or write about in a book. But it scares me a lot to have 'public' and 'online' resources like this. It is already so bad on the market that almost monthly we can find some fakes out on the market.

Resources should stay in hands of experts (it took me years and many hours to compile) and not freely available to people who want to fake stuff.

I agree with Beren for the most part here - one of the biggest problems with fakes right now is that it is so easy to duplicate from high-res images.

I don't know if you all recall, but when the Children of Hurin signed bookplates came out (the New York Barnes & Noble version from 2007), they were appearing on eBay almost immediately, and most/all had good provenance. About a week later, someone posted an eBay auction for one, and included a very large, high-res image of the bookplate. As an unfortunate aside, the bookplate itself is just a black and white design, that reporoduces very well with a good scanner/printer. Suddenly, there were dozens of copies of the "signed bookplate" on eBay, all looking remarkably the same, and with no provenance.

I think there might be a good market for having an online set of articles and images to help the collector, that are "destroyed" for purposes of reproducability/faking (watermarked, low-res, other possibilities), but I haven't figured out a good way to do anything like that that would help the collector but be of no use to the forger. I would love to hear more opinions/discussion on this!

One possibility is to have a tight-knit circle of trusted people that would have access to the database, but anything online is hackable or expensive. One question to pose to you all is, would it be worth enough to you to have access to something like this to have a fee attached to it?

Personally, I wouldn't pay anything to view such a database, and when it comes down to it, regardless of what security measures you take to prevent people from reproducing or trying to fake the signatures you upload to this website, there are dozens, maybe even hundreds of other sites and pages that contain Tolkien letters and signatures. In addition, many of the auction houses now have archives of many of the Tolkien letters that have sold (or not sold) with pictures and all you have to do (at the most) is sign-up for a free account to view the images. Then you have eBay and random personal pages and the list goes on and on. I think, if anything, this site has done an outstanding job in spotting the fakes and seeking to counter and eliminate them. I think we should continue to be in dialogue about Tolkien signatures and their authenticity, and if that means uploading pictures occasionally, I'm all for it. I can see Beren's point, but I just disagree that a forum like this is going to contribute more to the counterfeiting; in my opinion, the counterfeiting is going to go on whether this site exists or not.

I do agree with Beren and Jeremy. I cherish and guard copies of Beren's overview of the development of Tolkien's signature precisely because he has trusted me with them.

As to the question of fee, I am not a collector of or trader in signatures or signed works. To me, such a database represents knowledge that is of interest to me for satisfying my personal curiousity; additionally, it may enable me to warn or advise people, more importantly, to pinpoint the limits of my expertise. But it does not represent monetary value that I'm likely to realise. On the other hand, it could represent considerable monetary value to the faker, so considerable incentive to him hack, with the necessary security therefor concomitantly expensive. In short, I would expect (indeed almost advise) that a higher fee should be put on this than I would be prepared to pay.

This kind of discussion is exactly why I love this site. I can understand Beren's fear of providing resources to forgers. My question served its purpose. Should I have further needs, I now know how many examples Beren has access to.

Just pondering the matter, I wonder how many things we sign in a lifetime? What got me to thinking was the 1500 items in Beren's list. Averaged over his life, that is less than 20 items per year. I'd bet that major sports figures sign 1500 per year. Thanks for the comments all!

Away from The Green Hill Country,

Parmastahir

Parmastahir said,

Just pondering the matter, I wonder how many things we sign in a lifetime?

Tolkien is probably at the low end of the scale here, he was never "in the limelight" doing mass signings, etc.

Personally, I probably sign less than two dozen things a year, mostly paperwork for my job (I am not the check/cheque writer of the family). Some authors have had "signed limited editions" put out post-mortem where the signatures are actually cut from checks, since they signed so few items when they were alive.

Someone like Alan Lee has probably signed thousands of items per year since the movies came out. Some very popular authors I know have done five hundred book signings in a few hours. So a book tour would produce possibly tens of thousands of signed books in a year.

Circling back to Tolkien, I think it is quite fortuitous that he saved carbon copies of so many letters he wrote - the bulk of the Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien would not have been possible if he hadn't kept those, since the copies that were mailed are likely mostly lost forever.

I agree with Jlong here. I don't think us discussing (& posting) on this site really has any baring or influence on the counterfeit market.

First and foremost this forum is for discussion. Talk of archives and databasing, whilst interesting and in many respects appealing, is one step (in my opinion) towards shattering the whole appeal and pleasure in collecting for the amateur/private collector. By quantifying everything (or aiming to), we risk loosing (sanitising) everything that makes (for me) book collecting (I include in this the collecting of information of any kind about books) what it is.

If I have any issues or questions about signatures, I'll continue to raise them here on the forum, or simply communicate them privately with Beren...

BH

To add a late thought to this thread, a public database of signatures would almost certainly involve legal rights issues, in that one would be reproducing a significant mass of material compared with, say, Beren’s very limited selection on the Tolkien Library site. Christina and I have a large collection ourselves, but many of the examples are on documents gathered with the understanding that they would be for our personal research only.

Wayne