The Emily Dickinson poem purchased by the Jones Library of Amherst, Massachusetts, in early June for $24,150 (AL, Aug., p. 20) has been declared a fake. Selby Kiffer, senior vice-president of Sotheby's Books and Manuscripts Department, said the full amount the library paid will be refunded.

Brent Ashworth, president of Utah's Emily Dickinson Society and longtime manuscript collector, alerted the library in August that the Dickinson poem might be bogus.

Jones Library Curator Daniel Lombardo announced August 28 that the 15 lines had been produced by noted forger Mark Holmann. A 1987 Time magazine article related how Hofmann skillfully faked a letter he had passed off as written by an early Mormon Church convert.

"Hofmann and I knew one another as fellow Mormons and lived in the same area. He showed me the poem in his living room -- he knew of my longstanding Dickinson interest -- and the price was $10,000," Ashworth told AL. "What bothered me was the content of the thing.... It was certainly her worst!"

When he saw the poem offered in Sotheby's June 3 catalog, Ashworth remembered its content. By then Hofmann had gone to prison for 10 years for two counts of second-degree murder and confessed to several forgeries.

Lombardo was finally persuaded of the forgery by a copy of a letter from Hofmann to his lawyer in which the con artist mentions and quotes from the poem.

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