Antiquarian books remind us of the risks of trust misplaced
Dipping into the books on a shelf in an antiquarian bookshop reminds us that human beings have changed little over time. There is an endless supply of fraudsters and people who are only too willing to delude themselves.
In the 1630s, sober Dutch burghers fell prey to tulip mania, paying huge sums for rare bulbs from Turkey that produced the coveted striped blooms. Less than a century later, the English and the Dutch again were deceived by the promoters of a scheme to trade Britain’s national debt for “investments” in South America. In France, John Law wrought similar magic with the Mississippi Company. But like Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scam victims, in the end the speculators found themselves holding worthless paper when the bubble burst, as all bubbles do.
Their hopes and dreams are preserved in old books, caught in words and pictures that portray the uncertainties of their age. A crowd of allegories speaks of ambiguity, precariousness, duplicity, blurred edges between hope and despair, fact and fiction, reason and folly.
The creative power and fecundity of these early allegories challenged the English philosopher John Locke’s view that figurative speech is misleading in its “inconstant” use of terms that “insinuate wrong ideas.” To many of his contemporaries – and many who came after him – the dynamics of credit and trust defied rational arguments. Reliance and confidence lent themselves less to logic than to allegory.
No matter how many sophistications and financial, social and discursive tools we have developed over the past couple of centuries, these metaphors still offer a way of making sense of complexity. They also shape how we think of and deal with the thrill, fear, elation, disappointment, and unquenched need to trust others.
Long before the conscious creation of allegories to represent credit, a bond had formed between alchemy and wealth. If wealth depended on metal stock, and if alchemy could increase the amount of precious metal, then transmutation would be the answer for a wanting purse, and even for a stagnant nation. As early as 1317, the title of a papal decree against alchemists, De Crimine Falsi (crimes of falsehood), spells out the already solid connection between alchemy and money forgery. Pope John XXII’s indictment of those who purported to perform “sophistic transmutation” of metals mirrors the fraudulent world in which riches were infinitely available, a world vividly evoked by Chaucer and Dante.
Papiers Monoies [France, early 19th century] This fine hand-colored print depicts paper banknotes issued as currency in France from 1790 to 1796 and essentially not worth the paper on which they were printed. Though supposedly underwritten by property confiscated from the Roman Catholic Church, they were issued pell-mell around the country and easy to forge. Here, they lie scattered, as though thrown down on a playing table. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the bright red pips of a single playing card ominously half-appearing in a heap of equally hazardous gambling relics.