_Item_: Every art dealer in Vienna received, on the same day, twenty-five different paintings by Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. Each was subsequently established as being fully authentic, to the consternation of those museums and private collectors in a dozen countries who had acquired, at enormous cost, the originals. _Item_: The Tate Gallery in London was notified by the confused headmaster of a private school near Bath that one thousand copies of a celebrated Van Gogh had been delivered to him, apparently in error. At least, he said, they _seemed_ to be copies. He had recalled that the Tate owned the original. Perhaps the shipment had been intended for the Gallery? The Tate officials grimly agreed that it probably had. _Item_: One morning, the base of one exterior wall of the Louvre was found to be solidly lined with the "Mona Lisa." There were hundreds of them, side by side, smiling enigmatically out across the Seine, and each, naturally, was as genuine as the single one inside the great palace. * * * * * What was perhaps the most serious case occurred in New York. Directors of a famous art museum were notified one day in a letter from a law firm that a wealthy gentleman, recently deceased, had willed to the museum his entire collection of paintings. Would the directors care to appear at such-and-such an address the following day to inspect the offered canvases? The directors wrote a polite acknowledgment and the next day dispatched one of their junior members to the address given. Presumably the donor had left them an attic-full of junk, but still there might be something worthwhile there. The junior member telephoned his colleagues at once. They hastened to the spot. The collection was most remarkable. It covered every wall of every room in an otherwise vacant five-story building, and the directors could hardly call any of it junk, for it duplicated with the most appalling exactitude the entire contents of their own museum. Every last painting was reproduced there, and as if that were not enough, inspection of the basement revealed that for each canvas displayed in the rooms above, a precise duplicate existed in storage. The directors were aghast. It was Manet and Holbein all over again, but on a scale beyond all imagining. To make matters worse, someone had impudently tipped off the press, and there was a crowd of reporters and photographers, not to mention a number of curiosity-seekers who had wandered in from the street. One of the directors telephoned the museum and ordered it closed immediately, but of course that could not prevent the instant collapse of the values of the museum's collection.