How to Tell If an Autograph Is Real

Before you compare a signature to anything, confirm that ink was applied to the object in front of you. An enormous share of what collectors bring in was never signed — it was printed, machined, or signed by an employee. None of those are forgeries in the criminal sense, which is exactly why they circulate so freely.

Preprints

The signature is part of the image. Tilt the piece under a raking light: applied ink sits on the surface and catches the light differently from the photograph around it, while a printed signature lies flat in it. Under magnification, printed ink breaks into the same dot pattern as the picture.

Secretarials

Signed by an assistant, often for decades, often skilfully. These fool experienced people, because they are period-correct in every respect except the hand. They are identified by knowing the specific secretarial hand, not by intuition.

Autopen

A machine tracing a stored pattern. The giveaway is sameness: identical line paths and identical pen pressure across multiple examples, with starts and stops in exactly the same places. Two autopens from the same pattern overlay perfectly. Two genuine signatures never do.

Copies

A scan or photocopy of a signed item, sometimes printed on period-looking stock. Ink has no gloss and no bite into the paper, and the signature is often suspiciously well placed.

Beginners compare a signature to an exemplar the way you would compare two photographs, looking for a match. Forgers rely on that, because copying a shape is the one thing they are practising. What they cannot easily copy is how the shape was produced.

• Speed. A genuine signature is written, not drawn. Look for tapered entries and exits where the pen was already moving when it touched down.
• Pressure variation. Real writing swells and thins as the hand changes direction. Forged lines tend to hold one weight throughout.
• Hesitation. Tiny wobbles, blunt starts, retouched loops and pen lifts in the middle of a stroke are signs of someone watching their own line.
• Letter construction. The order and direction in which strokes are built is habitual and specific. A forger reproduces the outcome, not the route.
• Consistency with the period. Hands change. A signature from the last years of a long career should not look like one from the first.
• The pen itself. A ballpoint signature on a 1930s photograph is an anachronism; so is a modern felt tip on period paper.

Exemplars matter here, and the source of them matters more. Compare against signatures with known provenance and a known date, not against whatever a search returns — a large share of images online are of items that were themselves fakes.

Half of the vintage material that fails does so before the signature is considered at all, because the thing it is signed on is wrong.

• Paper and photographic stock have datable characteristics — weight, surface, borders, back-stamps, trimming.
• A signature dated before the image existed is a common and fatal error. Check that the photograph could have been in circulation when it was supposedly signed.
• Studio marks, agency stamps and production paperwork are evidence in themselves, and are much harder to fabricate convincingly than a loose photo.
• Ink should behave its age. Old ink oxidises, bites and sometimes offsets onto whatever faced it. Fresh ink on old paper often looks exactly like what it is.

Provenance is not a romantic extra. It is the part of the item that can be checked by someone other than you. A story that names a person, a place and a date can be tested. A story that cannot be tested is decoration, however charming.

• Who obtained it, when, and in what circumstances — a signing, a set, a stage door, an estate.
• Whether the person who obtained it can still be asked, or left documentation that can be read.
• Whether the chain since then is continuous, or has a gap where the piece could have been swapped.
• Whether the certificate, if there is one, pictures the actual item rather than describing a category of item.

On which point: a certificate is not evidence of authenticity, it is evidence of an opinion. Whose opinion is the whole question, and are autograph certificates of authenticity worth anything deals with it directly.

Self-checking is enough to reject most bad pieces. It is rarely enough to accept a good one, because accepting requires knowing what the genuine article looks like across a whole career, including the periods you have never handled.

Have it looked at properly when any of these is true: the value is material to you, the signer is one of the heavily faked names, the piece is vintage and nobody alive saw it signed, the provenance has a gap, or you are about to sell it and want the buyer's questions answered before they ask.

Where to get an autograph authenticated sets out what the options actually are and what each of them is and is not worth.