autographs bought and sold,” reads the business card Ed Bomsey hands me in his basement office in Northern Virginia. It’s an obsession, he tells me, that began in the mid-1960s on the Bronx campus of New York University. Newly elected to student government, Bomsey found an old letter declining an invitation to visit.

“I said, ‘Hey, guys, we have this from Harry Truman!’ ” he recalls. “One guy said, ‘Take it.’ ” Bomsey did. Today, he still treasures that letter, secure in the knowledge that the signature on it came directly from the former President’s hand.

“Truman,” Bomsey explains, “did not use an autopen.”

“If the President was signing every document put in front of him, we’d have a dead President in 48 hours.”

A mechanical device capable of faithfully replicating a person’s signatur

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