Rendell's World: From Fakes To Gates

From his home on the windward side of Maui, the side not blessed with year-round sunshine, Kenneth Rendell contemplated the rain. Outside a late summer squall was brewing, and raindrops falling horizontally entered through the louvered windows. But Rendell knew the storm wouldn't last long; already he could see the patches of blue beyond the gray. Not at all like Seattle rain, he said, all mist and no fury.

After frequent visits to Seattle over the past two years, Rendell, a Boston-based rare-manuscripts dealer, has become intimately familiar with Seattle rain, and, like a native, has reached a point where he doesn't even notice it anymore.

What brought him to Seattle was an assignment, the latest highlight in a remarkable career.

In his 38 years in the business, countless rare and important historical documents have passed through Rendell's hands, from letters by George Washington to correspondence by more recent leaders like Dwight Eisenhower. He also has played a crucial role in unmasking some notorious fakes, including the purported diaries of Adolf Hitler and Jack the Ripper.

It's work that has also been lucrative. Today, Rendell has galleries in New York City and Beverly Hills, employs 16 people, and counts among his clientele many of the Forbes list of the richest people in the nation, along with celebrity collectors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Spielberg, Paul Newman and Barbra Streisand.

Rendell returns to Seattle today to be the guest speaker at a banquet that opens the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair. He will be signing copies of his book "Forging History: the Detection of Fake Letters and Documents" tomorrow at the fair.

He also will continue his ongoing work of filling the library in Bill Gates' Medina mansion.

Rendell declines to go into detail about the work he's doing for Gates and his wife, Melinda French. But as more and more people, mainly dignitaries and selected members of the media, have toured the mansion, word has started to leak out about the contents of the three-room library.

Gates reportedly has four first-edition copies of "The Great Gatsby," along with first editions of boyhood favorites "A Catcher in the Rye" and "A Separate Peace." He also owns a Napoleonic manuscript and, of course, the Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci's notebook that he bought for $30.8 million at an auction three years ago.

Rendell's job is to stock the library, which will ultimately have 10,000 volumes. Gates, who has a wide range of interests, is reportedly collecting presidential letters and books on the history of computers and is actively involved, along with his wife, in the selection of books.

It was a intense interest in the human side of history that first drew Rendell, 54, into collecting and selling rare letters and manuscripts.

"I started collecting when I was a boy," said Rendell. "I was fascinated by people's letters, by their interests, and how they saw their lives. When you read the history books, the official versions of history, you just don't get the flavor of the human being."

When he's not buying for his clients, Rendell is adding to his own collection of Western Americana and World War II materials. His favorite piece is a touching letter that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his wife from Africa in 1943 after he received his fourth star. In the letter, Eisenhower reflects on the human costs behind the honor he was bestowed, revealing the man behind the historical figure.

"That one I kept," Rendell said. "I couldn't sell it."

Expertise enlisted

For more than two decades, Rendell's expertise in authenticating documents has led to his involvement in several high-profile forgery cases. In 1983, he was hired as a consultant by Newsweek magazine, which was then considering buying the publishing rights to the purported diaries of Adolf Hitler.

The German magazine Stern had paid $5 million for the diaries after a dealer said they had been recovered from a plane crash in East Germany at the end of the war.

But after seeing pictures of the diaries in Stern magazine, Rendell suspected that they were fakes. When he was given access to two of the volumes of the diaries, the discrepancies in the handwriting and letter patterns supported his beliefs. Forensic studies done on the papers later proved they were forgeries.

It is the willingness of people to suspend their judgment and be swept away by the excitement of a new discovery that allows for the success of most forgeries, including the Hitler diaries, Rendell said.

"People don't want to focus on the real issue," Rendell said. "People lose sight. They believe what they want to believe."

In 1985, Rendell was again called in to work on a case involving a Salt Lake City dealer in historical documents accused of killing two people in an attempt to cover up his forgeries of Mormon documents.

Mark Hofmann, the accused murderer, was a familiar figure in the small world of historical documents, said Rendell. He was a regular at antiquarian book fairs, constantly searching out Mormon artifacts. A year before his arrest, he had bought a Joseph Smith document for $12,500 from Rendell.

But while he sold some genuine documents, he also was a technically brilliant forger who found a chemical process that kept ink from feathering when applied to old paper - a telltale sign of a forgery.

When prosecutors showed Rendell pieces of a manuscript Hofmann sold, Rendell concluded they were fake. And when they were examined with high-powered ultraviolet light, they were found coated with a chemical that fluoresced bright blue, a clear indication that it was not a historical document. Hofmann was later found guilty of the murders and sentenced to life in prison.

The diary of Jack the Ripper that surfaced in 1992 was easier to debunk. Rendell was hired by Time-Warner to inspect the book, which it was considering publishing. Words used in the text seemed out of sync with the time in which the diary was supposedly written, in the late 1880s. A check into the Oxford English Dictionary later revealed that some of the phrases didn't come into popular use until 1925. Rendell found the will of the man alleged to be Jack the Ripper and found that the handwriting on the will and in his "diary" were entirely different.

Although Time-Warner abandoned the project, it was later sold to another publisher who still published the book, acknowledging the studies done on the book and leaving it up to the reader to decide its authenticity.

Concentrates on business

Because investigations are time-consuming, Rendell has largely focused on his business.

While his business is thriving, Rendell believes that the world of rare manuscripts and documents is coming to a close. Ironically, modern technology will likely speed its end.

With the invention of the automatic pen and its widespread use starting in the 1960s, many letters were signed by machine. Even before that, the telephone had already begun to replace letters as the preferred form of personal communication. The situation has only gotten worse with the invention of fax machines and computers, and while computers may have revived a form of personal correspondence, e-mail disappears with a tap on the keyboard.

"There's been such a decline in the material being produced," he said. "I'm not encouraging my kids to come into the business. But it's too bad that we're losing a sense of connection with history. There will be nothing left to collect."