Frank W. Tober collection on literary forgery

The Frank W. Tober collection on literary forgery comprises letters, books, pamphlets, galley proofs, etchings, photogravures, journals and journal articles, newspaper clippings, auction and exhibition catalogs, and other ephemera related to literary forgery. While Tober collected specimens of a variety of manuscript and printed forgeries, he was most interested in the literary forgeries of Thomas J. Wise and H. Buxton Forman.

Series I. Thomas J. Wise and the Wise-Forman Forgeries comprises the vast majority of Tober's collection. Tober collected numerous examples of the forgeries published by Wise, which have been cataloged in the print collection of Special Collections. Tober also acquired many original letters by Thomas J. Wise and H. Buxton Forman, including correspondence with Frederick Britten Austin, E. H. Coleridge, Richard Curle, Edmund Gosse, A. Edward Newton, John Payne, Gabriel Wells, and Gordon Wordsworth.

In addition to the original Wise-Forman material, Tober also amassed a comprehensive collection of letters, books, articles, auction and exhibition catalogs, and newspaper clippings about the discovery of Wise's involvement in the forgeries and its aftermath. He also obtained correspondence, notes, drafts, offprints, and publications related to authors who wrote about the Wise-Forman forgeries, including John Carter, John Collins, Wilfred Partington, Graham Pollard, Fannie Ratchford, William Todd, and Gabriel Wells. Tober even collected materials concerning other Wise collectors, such as Maurice Pariser, whose collection formed the basis for the 1967 exhibition, Wise After the Event .

Series II. Other Forgeries comprises individual specimens of forged manuscript documents acquired by Tober, including items purportedly by Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Julia Ward Howe, Abraham Lincoln, John Milton, and Edgar Allan Poe. Also included is a Spanish forgery of an illuminated manuscript created circa 1910. Subseries II.A. focuses on American author and poet Frederic Prokosch and his so-called "Butterfly Books" forgeries. This subseries includes drafts and research for Tober's article about Prokosch, "A Local Forger," that appeared in the September 1989 newsletter of the Delaware Bibliophiles. Also included in this series are numerous articles, journals, and books Tober collected about literary forgery.

Series III. Miscellaneous letters and documents comprises a small group of apparently authentic materials collected by Tober that dates to the same period as his forgery collection. These include several letters related to Pre-Raphaelite artists, such as Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his brother William Rossetti; and also includes letters by art critic John Ruskin, Delaware senator and Civil War veteran H. A. "Colonel Henry" du Pont, May Morris (younger daughter of William Morris), and a letter on Cuala Press letterhead written by Elizabeth Yeats.