The book forgery of Thomas James Wise, disclosed in 1934 in John Carter and Graham Pollard's An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, is perhaps the most notorious literary scandal of the 20th century. Wise, a bibliographer and book collector with the highest international reputation, was revealed to be the perpetrator of a stream of forgeries of minor works by major nineteenth-century authors which had appeared on the market from the 1880s - among them works by the Brownings, Swinburne, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Ruskin and Kipling.

The sensational exposure of Wise led to further discoveries, most notably that he had acted not alone but in collusion with Harry Buxton Forman, the distinguished editor of Keats and Shelley. The extent of the crime was clearly wider and more complicated than had been supposed when the Enquiry was first published.

Carter and Pollard were steadily compiling matter for a new edition of the book right up to their deaths in the mid 1970s. Their material passed to Nicolas Barker, who with John Collins undertook to complete the work. They in turn have discovered a mass of new facts. Type, paper, and records of sales have produced new revelations: the forgeries are shown to have begun earlier than was suspected; the problems of Tennyson's The New Timon and R. L. Stevenson's Ticonderoga are solved; for the first time, an attempt to reconstruct the crimes is made.