The Fenwick sheets

In 1992 nine pages surfaced purporting to be an unpublished continuation of the lore/tone-tables, including four readings from the Ferris route after the 1983 removal — which, if genuine, would have meant the bridge was still up years after everyone believed it had gone.

They were forgeries. They were also very good ones, and the eleven days it took to establish that are the most instructive eleven days in the folder.

Why they were plausible

The hand is right. Whoever made them had studied the published tables closely enough to reproduce the layout, the per-reading error convention, and — most convincingly — the specific habit of noting board, not frame where a measurement was taken at the test board rather than the frame. That detail appears nowhere in any summary. You would only know it from the tables themselves, which per lore/tone-tables almost nobody has read.

The content was plausible too. Nothing in the four disputed readings was outlandish. They were slightly interesting, which is the correct amount for a forgery and the thing amateurs get wrong.

How they fell

Not on content. On paper.

The sheets were mimeographed on stock with a watermark that entered production in 1987. The readings were dated 1985.

That is the whole of it, and it was noticed by somebody who was not looking for a forgery and had simply held the page up to a window.

What the eleven days revealed

The forgery is a footnote. What the episode exposed is that during those eleven days, four separate people confirmed the sheets as consistent with their own copies of the tables — and every one of those confirmations turned out to be a check against a summary rather than against the tables.

Nobody in the tradition, at that moment, had a complete set to check against. The material everyone cited as bedrock existed, in practice, as a handful of paraphrases of a paraphrase.

lore/sisken is recorded as having declined to confirm, in writing, on the grounds that he had not seen the originals. This is usually told as the archivist's instinct being vindicated. It is more interesting as the one case where somebody's refusal to help was the only honest response available, and it was read at the time as obstruction.

Who

Unestablished, and the tradition has been notably incurious about it.

The prevailing view is that finding out would be worse than not knowing — the field is small, the forger is likely someone whose other contributions are load-bearing, and there is no version of the discovery that leaves the archive in better condition than it is now.

That position is defensible and it is also exactly the position a tradition adopts when it suspects the answer. lore/sources notes drily that the Fenwick sheets are the only item in the bibliography whose provenance is known to be false and whose author is unknown, which is an unusual combination and has never been explained.