Secretarial Signatures: The Fake That Was Sent Officially

Where secretarials came from

From the studio era onwards, the volume of fan mail reaching well-known figures made personal signing impossible. Studios, clubs and management offices employed staff whose job included signing photographs. The practice was routine, undisguised at the time, and continued through the second half of the twentieth century into the present day.

Because these items arrived through official channels, families often hold them in complete good faith for decades. A great many pieces offered as inherited or original fan-mail responses are secretarial, and the seller genuinely does not know.

How to recognise one

The giveaway is consistency where consistency should not exist. A person's signature varies with mood, pen, surface and haste. A staff member producing hundreds a week develops a rapid, uniform version that is often neater and more legible than the genuine article.

Look also for the wrong kind of confidence. Secretarials tend to be written slowly and carefully, producing even pressure and rounded letterforms, where a genuine signature from someone signing constantly is usually faster, looser and less complete.

• Unusually neat and fully legible where the real signature is abbreviated
• Even pen pressure throughout, with no acceleration
• Multiple examples in the market that match each other almost exactly
• A dedication in different handwriting to the signature itself

The periods and names most affected

Golden-age Hollywood is the heartland: studio publicity departments dispatched signed portraits at industrial scale. Certain politicians, astronauts, royal households and major football clubs are similarly well documented as having used secretarial signing for correspondence.

Reference matters here more than instinct. For a name known to have used secretarial help, a specialist will know which years, which hands and which photograph stock. That is the sort of detail that separates a considered purchase from a hopeful one.

What a secretarial is actually worth

As memorabilia, very little — typically a fraction of a genuine example, and sometimes only the value of the photograph itself. As a historical curiosity from a studio archive it may hold modest interest, but nobody should pay authentic-signature prices for one.

The honest position, which we take with pieces brought into the shop, is to say so plainly. A family disappointed today is better served than a family that discovers it at probate.

Every item we sell is supplied with the WDW Certificate of Authenticity, signed by Derek Warwick and valid for as long as you own the piece.

Protecting yourself when buying

Fan-mail provenance is not a positive signal on its own; it is neutral at best. What helps is a seller who explicitly addresses the secretarial question rather than ignoring it, and who will put their opinion in writing.

• Ask directly: has this signatory been documented as using secretarial signing?
• Prefer pieces with signing-event or collection provenance over postal provenance
• Compare against several dated genuine examples, not one
• Buy from a dealer who will refund if a piece is later shown to be secretarial