Author: Joseph Hone

Review – The Paper Chase

Posted September 5, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – The Paper Chase

The Paper Chase: The Printer, The Spymaster & The Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers

by Joseph Hone

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 272
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

In the summer of 1705, a masked woman knocked on the door of David Edwards’s London workshop. She did not leave her name, only a package and a coded means of identifying her courier.

Edwards was a Welsh printer working in the dark confines of Nevill’s Alley, outside the city walls. The package was an illegal, anonymous pamphlet: The Memorial of the Church of England. The argument it proposed threatened to topple the government, but sedition sold well in the coffeehouses of Fleet Street and the woman promised protection. Edwards swiftly set about printing and surreptitiously distributing the pamphlet.

Parliament was soon in turmoil and government minister Robert Harley launched a hunt for all those involved. When Edwards was nowhere to be found, his wife was imprisoned and the pamphlet was burnt in his place. The printer was not the only villain, though, and Harley had to find the unknown writers who wished to bring the government down.

Full of original research, The Paper Chase tears through the backstreets of London and its corridors of power as Edwards’s allegiances waver and Harley’s grasp on parliament threatens to slip. Amateur detectives and government spies race to unmask the secrets of the age in this complex break-neck political adventure. Joseph Hone shows us a nation in crisis through the fascinating story of a single incendiary document.

Joseph Hone’s The Paper Chase: The Printer, The Spymaster, and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers digs into the publication and censorship of a very particular pamphlet published in 1705 by a Welsh printer working in London, David Edwards. It’s actually available online via the Open Library, if you’re curious to get a look at it.

Joseph Hone paints a vivid picture of the world of illicit printing and its dangers through the reception of the Memorial, and David Edwards’ run from the law. Much of the book focuses on the government minister, Robert Harley, and his attempts to find and punish the authors of the Memorial; this somewhat makes sense as a choice because the best evidence is what Harley had in his hands, with the true authors of the Memorial probably eventually correctly identified, but not through books and papers of their own. (At least, if they exist then Hone doesn’t discuss them at all.)

On the other hand, it means that the narrative is pretty much on Robert Harley’s side — the side of censorship. It does sympathise somewhat with Edwards, whose life and livelihood were threatened while the influential writers of the pamphlet hid (after assuring him of their protection when he agreed to print it for them)… but mostly it follows Harley’s efforts to track down the perpetrators. The tone is anti-Whig, pro-Tory, pro-censorship, I think; perhaps that was somewhat forced upon the author by the angle he used to get at the whole thing and examine evidence, but… Hmm. In general, the heavily fictionalised narrative lends itself to all manner of bias.

In addition, it’s a little awkward to follow up on everything, because although there are notes, the book lacks numbered footnotes, and the bibliography is in the form of a bibliographic essay. I admit, I didn’t dig into that at all, other than looking up the Memorial for myself and a couple of historical facts.

It’s not all negative or ambivalent; I found the first half a little slow, as I tried to get my head around the period (which I don’t know very well), but the second half was pretty good. Mary Edwards (the printers’ wife) seemed pretty awesome, a determined investigator and advocate for her husband, though I wish there’d been more to know about the other women in the case (the woman in the vizard mask who took the material to David Edwards’ press to print, or the servant who was with her). It can be difficult to tell the fiction from the fact, but it was still an interesting read, bearing that in mind.

I’m a bit torn on how to rate it, so definitely bear in mind my caveats.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – The Book Forger

Posted August 12, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Book Forger

The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime That Fooled The World

by Joseph Hone

Genres: Mystery, Non-fiction
Pages: 336
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

London, 1932. Thomas James Wise is the toast of the literary establishment. A prominent collector and businessman, he is renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for unearthing the most stunning first editions and bringing them to market. Pompous and fearsome, with friends in high places, he is one of the most powerful men in the field of rare books.

One night, two young booksellers - one a dishevelled former communist, the other a martini-swilling fan of detective stories - stumble upon a strange discrepancy. It will lead them to suspect Wise and his books are not all they seem. Inspired by the vogue for Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, the pair harness the latest developments in forensic analysis to crack the case, but find its extent is greater than they ever could have imagined. By the time they are done, their investigation will have rocked the book world to its core.

I have a weird quibble with Joseph Hone’s The Book Forger which is going to sound very, very niche, but took me aback: he talks about Dorothy L. Sayers, and compares the real people about whom he’s writing to her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. He quotes from The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and then… very bizarrely gets everything wrong, claiming that Wimsey has found arsenic on the victim’s shoe (no, he found varnish) and that he died of it (no, he died of digitalin). What actually happens is that Wimsey visits the analyst with the varnish sample, and the analyst is finishing up with a sample that’s full of arsenic unrelated to Wimsey’s case.

It’s just a weird sloppy mistake, and it’s not germane to the overall point he’s making or the real detective work he’s recounting, but at the same time… if he can’t manage to read that scene properly, or research it to check his recollection is correct, how do I trust the rest of the book?

I keep getting stick now and then for noticing and caring about this sort of thing (and counting it into my ratings), but in non-fiction, it does matter. If you get wrong a point I can verify, or interpret a study without noticing it has bias (in the technical sense, e.g. like selection bias), or just make a muck of explaining something I understand well… how can I trust the rest of the work?

Now, that aside I did rather enjoy The Book Forger. I knew little about Thomas J. Wise beforehand, and nothing at all about the two men who unmasked him (Pollard and Carter), so the fact that it’s careful to set the scene is helpful, though there’s a certain amount of imaginative reconstruction (quoting e.g. letters wherever possible).

It’s worth keeping in mind while reading it that a certain amount of it is fiction in a sense, but it does lay out the likely events, grounded in the evidence that’s available (so far as I can tell), and it is quite the story. I’d maybe have liked to see the impacts a bit more: do the fakes still circulate? Might there be more that we haven’t identified and dissected? How has it impacted e.g. scholarship?

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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