In the 1960's an Englishman named John Fairchild came up with a brilliant antiques deception: he created fantasy belt buckles relating to the old American west.

The first to appear were buckles of the famous "Wells Fargo" express company. Others followed, spanning a range of products and services. Many of the buckles were marked as having been produced by "Tiffany New York", and they often carried embellishments on the reverse that indicated that they were "Property of" a company, or that they were awards for service, or some other type of presentation or souvenir piece. Additionally, Fiarchild obviously performed extensive research in creating his hoax buckles. In designing them he made use of original period advertising and documents for the images on the buckles. And on a number of the buckles, such as the Wells Fargo pieces, he left blanks where (in a separate step of the creation), a place name could be inserted to indicate the station or office where that buckle had been worn. And all of the places that were hand-stamped onto the buckles were, indeed, actual locations that were apprpriate to the company or product.
Genius.

These buckles were quickly sought after by collectors. One well-know militaria dealer told me how, in the mid-1960;s, he had paid $400 each for two of the Wells Fargo buckles at the Dallas gun show.

In fact, many people still do not know that these buckles were complete fantasy pieces, and they often sell for rather decent sums on Ebay.

The buckles are superbly made. They are die stamped, with excellent detail and made of solid brass. These are heavy and impressive pieces, very much like table medals.

These buckles have proved so popular over the decades that many of the designs were copied and are still being sld. However, these "fake Fairchild" buckles are rather poorly cast copies, not die struck, and they are made of pot metal with a brass-colored coating.

But here was Fairchild's icing on the cake: The man actually created a fake reference book ! He published a limited number of a very nice leather-covered book about these "rare" buckles, all supposedly having been collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by one man, who had worked in the mining industry. That man was real (although long dead when Fairchild created his book). The volume illustrated a great many of Fairchild's fantasy buckles as original, vintage pieces. The publishing date in the book was back-dated to the 1950's and the "publisher" was fictitious.

It was an elaborate and amazing hoax, but one that produced very popular items that are still copied (poorly) to tis day. Imagine: a forger fakes a Rembrandt painting in the 1960's. It is eventually found to be a fake, but prints and posters of the painting are still popular decades later.