Mr. Collier's Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age

“Wahrman guides the reader through the details of the evidence as he finds it on dozens of
canvases and, where possible, in Dutch archives with such a sure hand that most readers
will not feel that a better story is possible…”–Journal of Modern History

“It is difficult to find a book that has been so brilliantly researched; hard to match a scholar who has reconstructed so fine a web of influence. Mr. Collier’s Letter Racks makes an exceptional if idiosyncratic contribution to understanding the mentalite of the later Stuart age.”–David Howarth, American Historical Review

“Wahrman’s enthusiasm and his revitalization of a neglected artist is to be commended.”–Library Journal

“Dror Wahrman has identified a considerable body of work by a hitherto unremarked but consummate illusionist painter. His detective work is playful, and his multi-faceted arguments compelling, especially about forgery, censorship, textual representation, and painterly inscription. Mr. Collier’s Letter Racks has the intricate cleverness of a Borgesian fable and the biographical originality of A. J. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo. It carries the reader on a most unexpected, entertaining journey.”–Marina Warner

“Dror Wahrman’s superb sleuthing has uncovered scores of trompe l’oeil letter racks painted by the Dutch artist Edward Collier in late seventeenth-century England. Packed slyly into these pictures are unsettling questions about the printing revolution and politics of the day and the nature of artistic creation itself. Wahrman holds us in delightful suspense as he unravels this tale with humor and learning and reveals surprising precedents for the web revolution of our own time.”–Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds

“In Mr. Collier’s Letter Racks, Dror Wahrman forensically reconstructs the secret mental world of Edward Collier, an obscure Anglo-Dutch painter specializing in trompe-l’oeil canvasses in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Writing with his customary brio, panache, and chutzpah, and following as much in the footsteps of Umberto Eco as of Sherlock Holmes, Wahrman also shows how Collier’s paintings stand as witness to artistic, political, and media revolutions taking place around him at the dawn of the modern era.”–Colin Jones, Queen Mary, University of London

“An invitation to look closely at an extraordinary set of paintings, this study retrieves Edward Collier from the margins of art history and asks that we take seriously his immensely clever and witty letter-rack pictures. Dror Wahrman brilliantly positions the paintings in relation to Anglo-Dutch relations of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while keeping a sharp eye on the period’s ‘media revolution’ and its explosion of inexpensive printed materials. As the riddles abound, readers are in good hands with these two expert puzzle-masters: Wahrman and Collier are here perfectly matched in this captivating story.”–Craig Ashley Hanson, author of The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism

A lavishly illustrated solution to a 300-year-old puzzle, hidden in the enigmatic canvases and life of early modern painter Edward Collier