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 that sold anyway. The tone darkens with Wearside Jack, whose fake Yorkshire Ripper letters and tape diverted police while the real killer stayed free, and Mark Hofmann, who brewed period-accurate iron gall ink to forge the Salamander Letter before turning to murder. The episode ends in the modern crisis of authenticity: James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, poets adopting fake demographic identities, sock-puppet reviews, and the question of who is holding the pen in an age of AI.

• Why questioning a text’s source was nearly impossible before forensic science
• Paper chemistry and kerning: how Carter and Pollard busted a literary titan
• The halo effect and why critics evaluate the persona instead of the text
• Confirmation bias in a manhunt: the cost of the Wearside Jack hoax
• The empathy contract and what fake memoirs actually break