The Career of a Counterfeit Artist and the World of Literary Forgery (2002)

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Mark William Hofmann (born December 7, 1954) is an American counterfeiter, forger and convicted murderer. About the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525945962/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp;=1789&creative;=9325&creativeASIN;=0525945962&linkCode;=as2&tag;=tra0c7-20&linkId;=f41bbf0a15184ba82b85510b3f8a68ef Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished forgers in history, Hofmann is especially noted for his creation of documents related to the history of the Latter Day Saint movement. When Hofmann's schemes began to unravel, he constructed bombs to murder two people in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has been serving a life sentence at the Utah State Prison in Draper since 1988. Hofmann was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was reared in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) by two devoutly religious parents.[2] Hofmann was a below-average high school student, but he had many hobbies including magic, electronics, chemistry, and stamp and coin collecting.[3] He and his friends were said to have made bombs for fun on the outskirts of Murray, Utah.[4] According to Hofmann, while still a teenage coin collector, he forged a rare mint mark on a dime and was told by an organization of coin collectors that it was genuine.[5] Like many young men in the LDS Church, Hofmann volunteered to spend two years as an LDS missionary, and in 1973 the church sent him to the England Southwest Mission, where he was based in Bristol. Hofmann told his parents that he had baptized several converts; he did not tell them that he had also perused Fawn Brodie's biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History. While in England, Hofmann also enjoyed investigating bookshops and buying early Mormon material as well as books critiquing Mormonism.[6] Hofmann later told prosecutors that he had lost his faith in the LDS Church when he was about fourteen,[7][8] and a former girlfriend believed he performed his mission only because of social pressure and the desire not to disappoint his parents.[9] After Hofmann returned from his mission, he enrolled as a pre-med major at Utah State University. In 1979, he married Doralee Olds, and the couple eventually had four children.[10] Dorie Olds Hofmann filed for divorce in 1987 and became co-founder of a holistic healing company. In 1980, Hofmann said that he had found a 17th-century King James Bible with a folded paper gummed inside.[11] The document seemed to be the transcript that Joseph Smith's scribe Martin Harris had presented to Charles Anthon, a Columbia classics professor, in 1828. According to the Mormon scripture Joseph Smith–History, the transcript and its unusual "reformed Egyptian" characters were copied by Smith from the golden plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon. Hofmann constructed his version to fit Anthon's description of the document, and its "discovery" made Hofmann's reputation. Dean Jessee, an editor of Joseph Smith's papers and the best-known expert on handwriting and old documents in the Historical Department of the LDS Church, concluded that the document was a Joseph Smith holograph. The LDS Church announced the discovery of the Anthon Transcript in April and purchased it from Hofmann for more than $20,000.[12] Appraised by the LDS Church for $25,000, it was purchased on October 13 in exchange for several artifacts the church owned in duplicate, including a $5 gold Mormon coin, Deseret banknotes, and a first edition of the Book of Mormon. Assuming the document to be genuine, prominent Mormon academic Hugh Nibley predicted that the discovery promised "as good a test as we'll ever get of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon" because he thought the paper might be translated.[13] Zoology professor Barry Fell soon after claimed to have decoded the text.[14] Hofmann promptly dropped out of school and went into business as a dealer in rare books. He soon fabricated other historically significant documents and became noted among LDS Church history buffs for his "discoveries" of previously unknown materials pertaining to the Latter Day Saint movement. These deceived not only members of the First Presidency — notably Gordon B. Hinckley, then the de facto president of the church due to the poor health of more senior leaders[15] — but also document experts and distinguished historians.[16] According to Richard and Joan Ostling, Hofmann was by this time a "closet apostate" motivated not only by greed but also by "the desire to embarrass the church by undermining church history." During the early 1980s, a significant number of new Mormon documents came into the marketplace. Sometimes the church received these as donations, and others it purchased. According to the Ostlings, "The church publicized some of the acquisitions; it orchestrated public relations for some that were known to be sensitive; others it acquired secretly and suppressed." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hofmann