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Permalink Reply by BGK on July 6, 2017 at 4:45am

Urban Meyer's book "Above the Line" was sold during the Fall of 2015 as a "signed edition" but the books were all autopen signatures.  Same with Wayne Gretzky's book last year called 99: Stories of the Game, which caused a huge fuss when it was discovered the signatures were fake.  More recently, Brian Wilson's "signed edition"  for "I Am Brian Wilson" was found to be autopen.  The reality is that more and more modern athletes and/or celebrities are resorting to fakes.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Cyrkin, Admin on July 6, 2017 at 8:47am

It really is troubling. Plus now they have machines that can sign variations of signatures, so you'd need to look at a number of them to realize they are not genuinely signed.

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Permalink Reply by sling on July 7, 2017 at 5:19am

hard to believe Gretzky would stoop to this

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Permalink Reply by BGK on July 7, 2017 at 6:53am

The Gretzky situation was extremely disturbing.  I saw him in person at Barnes&Noble NYC where initially we were told he would sign up to 5 books; when I arrived 5 hours early, they told us the limit was 1 book.  So I ordered from B&N online; these were all autopen signatures.  Books-A-Million also sold autopen copies but when they realized it they willingly took returns.  Barnes and Noble - which has sold autopens on several occasions in the past - refused to even acknowledge what they were doing.  I lost a lot of respect for Gretzky over this; he had to know.

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Permalink Reply by BGK on July 7, 2017 at 6:58am

To Barnes and Noble's credit, however, they did pull the Brian Wilson fakes.  Here's what happened: B&N runs a Black Friday promotion that features signed books from many authors and they have begun to promote it heavily.  Last year, Wilson was one of maybe 50 authors whose books were featured.  When I went to B&N at opening time on Black Friday, there were no BW books and a lot of people were pissed, so the manager came out to explain that the corporate office had pulled all the books "because of an error."  In my opinion, even the managers weren't told the signatures were fake.  I then drove to another local B&N and found the situation to be identical.

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