Secretarial Signatures, Preprints & Forgeries

3. Secretarial signatures

A secretarial signature is one where the astronaut had someone else hand-sign items for them, usually a secretary. Of course some effort was made to make the secretarial signature look as similar as possible to the real thing and after some practice the result was likely to be pretty convincing and therefore very difficult to spot. Luckily for the collector, not many of the early NASA astronauts are known to have used a secretary to sign for them.

The most notable exception is Alan Shepard, who from the early 60s onwards had secretaries answer most of the signature requests he received (including signing letters). Although these are not as easy to identify as Autopen signatures I've attempted to identify some traits of these secretarial sigatures on the Alan Shepard Autopen page.

Gus Grissom also had a secretary sign on his behalf, if not the same extent as Shepard. I give some examples of these secretarial sigatures on the Gus Grissom Autopen page.

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