(Please be aware, this article was posted on April 1st)

Jeffrey Beall, known for his eponymous list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers” is back in the news, after several weeks of media silence.

Today, he reemerged into the spotlight with a new book about forgeries in the fine art market, titled The Art of the Beall, self-published on Amazon ($0.99 ebook), which is currently ranked #1 based on downloads.

The book, composed largely of text copy-and-pasted from Wikipedia, describes the history, detection and infamous criminals of art forgery. Beall dedicates a entire chapter to C. M Collidge’s Dogs Playing Poker, and another to La Bouche en Croissant by Jean Dubuffet, both of which he notes, in his brief introduction, as bringing immense joy to his university’s administration.

Universities don’t like negative things. They like happy, smiling people, not a lot of politics.

“Universities don’t like negative things,” Beall said recently in The New Yorker (22 Mar 2017). “They like happy, smiling people, not a lot of politics.”

Asked about what he plans on working on next, Beall responded, “Well, I’m still trying to figure that out. I’m considering of a compilation of R.E.M.’s hit song, Shiny Happy People.”