Signatures for Sale : Dealer Likes His Papers Rare

It’s that kind of a business for Kenneth W. Rendell--the big problem isn’t selling, it’s finding the merchandise.

“I have to wait for things to turn up,” he said. A document dealer’s lament.

Take the time a couple in suburban Boston, who had purchased a house, found trash bags in their basement containing papers and clothing. Rendell was summoned, and after rummaging through what seemed like worthless trash, turned up a badly soaked journal.

“Within a few minutes, I realized what it was,” he recalled.

Written in Pencil

Said a journal entry written in pencil: “We should be at the Pole now, radio that we have reached the Pole and are now returning on one motor with a bad oil leak, but we expect to be able to make Spitsburgen (island in the Arctic Ocean).”

Nothing less than a written message from explorer Adm. Richard Byrd to his pilot as they circled the North Pole. The journal subsequently was sold to the Polar Archives at Ohio State University for $160,000.

In contrast, four years ago, it was Rendell who gave a historic thumbs down.

He had been the only American invited to examine the sensational discovery of what appeared to be Hitler’s diaries. Newsweek had retained the services of the Boston-based manuscript dealer to authenticate papers for which the West German publication Stern had paid $3.1 million.

As other authorities were gushing over the find, Rendell quickly exposed the writings as fake.

“For one thing, whenever Hitler wrote a line, he slanted it downward. None of these lines were. Everybody who had examined the diaries had missed that completely.

“For another thing, when people sign something, they generally form the capital letters differently than they do in what they have written. And this hadn’t been done.

“Also, even superficial research into the dictator’s personal habits would have revealed that he always used high quality leather writing folders. These were cheap notebooks. It just wasn’t his style.”

And it was only last month (August) that Rendell sounded the whistle, or more accurately the Whistler, on art scholar Charles Merrill Mount, arrested twice by FBI agents (in Washington and Boston) after the discovery of 200 missing documents from the National Archives and the Library of Congress. The 59-year-old Mount is awaiting trial on possession of stolen documents.

“He had sold a Boston bookstore 20 letters by the painter (James Abbott McNeill) Whistler,” Rendell said. “When he told them he also had three letters by Abraham Lincoln, they consulted a reference volume and called the FBI, which got in touch with me.

“I saw that his Whistlers were among about 50 that I had sold to the Library of Congress between 1970 and 1974. They had my handwriting on them--the inventory numbers and cost.”

This case involved his own writing, but he emphasized that he isn’t usually for hire as an expert on handwriting of others. “But,” he said, “you have to have such expertise in my business.”

Although forgery of documents is probably on the increase, the 44-year-old Rendell prefers discussing trends in collecting rare documents, who is hot and why the hobby is increasing.

Contemplating the placement of framed rarities at his newly opened gallery in the Heritage Book Shop, 8540 Melrose Ave. (he has others in Boston, New York City, Chicago and London), the dealer philosophized:

“People are looking for heroes. As the world becomes depersonalized, events are overwhelming individuals. It means something for a person to have some kind of personal connection, if only in the form of a letter or document or signature. It takes the hero out of a museum and makes him real,” he said.

A Babe Ruth signature, for instance. “They are hard to find. I get one about every two months and can sell it immediately, usually for around $750.”

Little Logic

Sometimes, not always, there appears to be little logic in who’s hot at the moment:

- A Napoleon Bonaparte document goes for $1,000, whereas one by Arthur Wellington, who defeated him, goes for only $500.

- A signed check by Charles Dickens, who is hot now, goes for $600, whereas one by Alfred Tennyson commands only $350.

- There has been considerable interest in Victor Hugo (letter for $1,500) since the current success of the Broadway hit “Les Miserables.”

As for U.S. Presidents, it must pain a New Englander to admit it, but Rendell pointed the finger at John F. Kennedy as the chief executive responsible for the often cheap value of Presidents’ signatures--because of the introduction of the autopen and the practice of allowing secretaries to sign their names.

“As a congressman, Kennedy let his secretaries do this,” Rendell said. “It was deliberately deceptive.

“Until Kennedy, most presidential signatures were genuine,” the dealer explained. “Now you have to presume it isn’t, until proven otherwise.

“Jimmy Carter, according to his chief of staff Hamilton Jordan, started off wanting to sign everything, but after about three days into the presidency, he realized it would be impossible.

“We don’t even bother with typewritten letters ‘signed’ by Ronald Reagan, because authentication is too difficult.”

Indeed, according to Rendell, when Reagan was a movie star, many of his letters were written and signed with his name by his mother, who was employed by his studio.

Ah, but the pre-Kennedy Presidents, their scribblings rank alongside pricey artwork.

“A letter from Thomas Jefferson in 1795, before he became President, is perhaps one of the earliest American examples of midlife crisis,” the dealer mused. “In it, he wrote that ‘I have it in contemplation to banish pen, ink and paper from my farm.”’ For sale through the Los Angeles gallery, the letter’s current value is $20,000.

“Most Jefferson handwritten letters start at $8,500,” Rendell said.

The demand for Abraham Lincolns is in a class by itself. If you were to rate the popularity of signed presidential papers, the expert said, Lincoln’s at one time might have been four times more sought after than those of the other 39, now the figure is probably six.

And his signature alone has grown in value disproportionately: When James Polk’s was $1,000, Lincoln’s was $3,000. Polk now is at about $1,750, but Lincoln is at about $6,750.

All of which means that in the wide world of documents and their verification, a dealer had better be on his toes. Or at least have keen eyes.

Even masters get stung.

Rendell once paid $600 in a Paris bookshop for what was apparently a signed photo of Louis Pasteur. Upon closer examination the next day, he discovered that the signature had been printed by machine.

He was similarly deceived by a Winston Churchill signed photo he bought. The signature had been traced in ink over printing.

Reminders to Stay Alert

“I have a whole collection to remind me to stay alert,” the dealer grieved.

For some reason, he said, more forgeries probably exist now than ever before. The introduction of photocopying, however, has presented no challenge: “They are easy to tell, there is no flow of ink.

“Forgeries can be unmasked through a number of characteristics,” Rendell disclosed. “These include slow and hesitating strokes, a drawn appearance, individual letters too carefully formed, shakiness, too much ink at the start and ending of strokes, and so forth.”

Collecting the real thing is, he said, a growing pursuit nowadays, and not just among scholars.

It is, he went on, perhaps a telling sign of the times that, while 20 years ago there was little interest in the letters or documents of business leaders, that has changed dramatically.

“The papers of John Rockefeller, John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie and so forth now are highly salable.”

The New Englander said he doesn’t deal in, say, modern writers, because he doesn’t want to be selling something in which there may eventually be no interest.

Rendell got his start as a collector at age 10, when his father found an 1806 half dollar in change in his drugstore, and the youth sold it for $3.50. Later in life, he traded English copper coins for some letters by Presidents, and his vocation was born.

To underscore the challenge he faces, he mentioned that during his 27 years in the business, he has seen only two samples of writing by Michelangelo, one of which he handled and sold for $75,000 (the other is available for the samme sum).

But what other line of work has such surprises as when a Dutch couple came into his office with a suitcase full of musical manuscripts.

The suitcase had accompanied them from Holland when they emigrated at the outbreak of World War II. They had believed it contained family papers, had left it unopened for 40 years, then decided to go through it in anticipation of moving into a smaller house.

Inside it were musical compositions. This puzzled them, inasmuch as no one in the family had been a musician.

They went to Rendell’s office. Bottom line:

The papers were working manuscripts--not known to have survived--of Johannes Brahms. No one ever discovered how they had wound up in the suitcase, but they were sold for $500,000.