A fairly standard CDV of John Wilkes Booth drew quite a bit of interest when recently offered on eBay.  The vendor deals in Civil War material and was taking this out of his collection where it had resided since purchased out of an estate several years ago. A clipped signature of Booth was affixed to the bottom, a fairly common practice among autograph collectors. There was no LOA and the vendor did not represent himself as an expert, but thought it looked pretty close. It sold for $1240, a fraction of what an authentic specimen would sell for. Although the overall “pattern” of the signature looked correct, we were concerned that the two “o’s” in “Booth” were both closed, rather than open. The last two letters in the name also appeared inconsistent with known exemplars. A dicey situation!