On ebay, a dealer in Michigan, j_j_books, is offering signed copies of the 1938 Bobbs-Merrill Laughter in the Dark and the 1941 New Directions The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. The books have the bookplates of Richard Adams, the British author of Watership Down. Without having examined them first-hand, but going by the photos and descriptions, I am dubious of the authenticity of at least one of them.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, with a mangled dust jacket, has an inscription on the title page, “With much love | Vladimir Nabokov | 1945”. That is not Nabokov writing, especially to someone outside his intimate circle. Assuming that the inscription was meant for Adams and not someone else, Nabokov would not have written so warmly to someone of whom there is no evidence that they ever met or corresponded. In fact, in 1945, Adams was in the British army and Nabokov was living in the U.S.

The Laughter in the Dark could be legitimate. I don’t know. But that Richard Adams bookplate makes me wary of it.

The dealer, j_j_books, has offered and sold several inscribed or signed Nabokov books on ebay recently (Ada and Poems). That by itself, of course, doesn’t mean anything. But all of these books have supposedly been from collections of people who had no known connections to Nabokov.