ABSTRACT
One of the banes of the bibliographer’s life is the presence in some bibliographical lists of ghosts. There are some classic examples of such ghostly publications. Perhaps the most famous is that standard bibliography of scholarly works in German, published by Julius Petzholdt in the mid-nineteenth century. Petzholdt was for the most part a reputable bibliographer, but for some reason he could not resist the temptation to insert in his otherwise useful listing of serious works of scholarship, titles and names of authors which were false. The danger in such a practice of course is that the existence of even one false entry in a work alleged to be the result of sound scholarship destroys the worth of the entire bibliography. False bibliographic entries are much more difficult to uncover and display than are faked footnote entries or plagiarized passages in the body of a text. Even the most casual reader can easily detect that John Gerard was having a bit of fun when he describes in his Historie of Plants, published in 1633, a plant he calls the Goose tree, which he says he had observed in the marshes of western Scotland, a plant whose seed pods, once dropped into the wetness of the marsh, would produce young geese. But since “of the making of many books there is no end,” it is easy to believe that a book title, no matter how improbable it appears to be, might well exist.
