Appletons’ cyclopædia of American biography edited by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske Volume V. Pickering-Sumter

Fifth of 6 volumes in 4to. pp. x, 752. Original three-quarter morocco. Contains portraits. 

The present encyclopedia, here in its first edition, is still a useful standard work but contains a large number–perhaps as many as two hundred–of entirely imaginary ‘lives’, the work, assumably, of an unknown contributor paid item by item, or possibly an editor, Hermann Ritter, the head of Appleton’s Spanish department. A full tally of the spuria has yet to be completed; some are devilishly ingenious, and many have corrupted other standard histories and bibliographies. See C. D. MacDougall, Hoaxes. 2nd ed. New York, 1958., p. 227, and articles by John Hendley Barnhart, Frank M. O’Brien, and Margaret Castle Schindler, all cited in John Blythe Dobson, ‘The Spurious Articles in Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography – Some New Discoveries and Considerations’, in: Biography, 16 (1993), pp. 388-408. Ian Jackson of Berkeley, California, has done further (unpublished) work on the false entries.

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