In 1985 two people were killed by pipe bombs in Salt Lake City, and the bomber was a man who made fake paper. This episode surveys the bizarre, hilarious and sometimes deadly history of literary forgery, from works misattributed to historical figures to fictional memoirs and invented identities. We start with the three core motives, money, clout and ideology, and the original authority hack: Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a Syrian mystic whose false byline shaped Christian theology for a thousand years until Renaissance scholars caught the anachronisms.

We then follow the forensic takedown of Thomas James Wise, the respected Victorian collector undone by esparto grass in his paper pulp and a font not invented until the 1880s; the Ern Malley hoax that humiliated Angry Penguins; and Naked Came the Stranger, the deliberately terrible novel t ...