The evidence presented in this book to support its argument that literature and literary forgery have more in common than is generally acknowledged is available in the public record. None of it is buried in archives to which access is restricted, nor has a conspiratorial omerta obliged scholars to suppress it. The consensus, nevertheless, is that fake literature is an aberration best ignored rather than a critique of the twin institutions of literature and literary studies. Most people who publish, sell, review or judge books think that literary forgeries are an expensive waste of everybody's time. Because critics disapprove of spurious works published inadvertently, literary forgeries feature in histories of literature only if ‘serious’ writing is affected by them. As Michael Heyward observes, the ‘Ern Malley’ affair is remembered because it is ‘the definitive moment in Australian literary modernism’. In modern American poetry, however, the comparable hoax — uncannily named ‘Spectrism’ — is relatively unknown, and is either omitted from literary histories or mentioned only en passant. Critical of the fashion in an emergent modernism for multiplying ‘-isms’ such as Imagism, Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke published as ‘Emanuel Morgan’ and ‘Anne Knish’ a volume of mock-experimental poems entitled Spectra (1916). Prefaced with the obligatory manifesto, this one linking ‘Spectric’ poetry to Futurist painting, their work was taken as seriously as that of other competing groups until 1918, when Bynner revealed the hoax.