Present Tense: Actor Emilio Estevez has been selling autographs to keep himself afloat. Like many of his Brat Pack colleagues, things hadn't been going so well for him lately; in an attempt to raise finance for his forthcoming movie about Robert Kennedy he was forced to "do everything but sell the house". And to meet a $5,000 (€3,940) payment on that property, he flogged a few autographs.
He must have had some nervous moments with the bank manager - on eBay a signed, framed photo of Estevez will set you back €50. One without the frame will cost you €13. As a barometer of fame, it's fair to say that if your signature costs less than a bit of wood then things aren't going as well as you'd like.
His dad, Martin Sheen, is studying in Galway at the moment, so if Estevez had wanted to make a quick killing he should have dispatched him to Eason's in Dublin a couple of weeks back. The handful who managed to get signed copies of U2 By U2 can now shift the book on eBay for around €1,000. A true fan, of course, would hold on to their copy and wait until at least one of them dies and the price shoots right up.
Autographs have become big business - big enough that a major autograph heist in June netted thieves $300,000 (€236,370) in signatures. The sci-fi related merchandise was raided from a Las Vegas store. Despite that location, it is hard to imagine an Ocean's Eleven-type movie in which the world's most ingenious burglars break into a vault, spring the lock, and for a moment gaze in awe at their valuable prize - a signed photo of the guy who played Boomer in Battlestar Galactica.
The thieves, though, tend to be the ones selling autographs. It is estimated that between half and 75 per cent of the signatures on the market are fakes.
This has led to a parallel market in autograph authentication and claims that the companies offering such services
hold too much power. Buyers are now urged to buy memorabilia only if it is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, meaning that if it is ruled that your Michael Flatley autograph is a forgery, then it doesn't matter if you witnessed him sign it while tap-dancing six foot in the air - you won't get top price for it.
It opens up a scenario in which Emilio Estevez has to go to an independent autograph authentication company just to double-check that pictures he hand-signed himself are the real thing. And an even more delightful scenario in which he is told that they are not.
But celebrities have never been averse to sending fakes to fans. Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra are known to be among those who, rather than risk writer's cramp, got a flunky to sign instead. In the 1980s, the official Queen Fan Club flooded the market with fake signatures. There was such a disregard for accuracy that, as with fingerprints, no two Freddie Mercurys look alike.
JUST AS PROBLEMATIC has been the rampant use of the Autopen, the cutting edge in autograph illegitimacy. It takes a template of a famous signature, then knocks out copies, sometimes at a rate of 3,000 a day. Experts say Autopen signatures can be spotted in how they often look like they've been signed by a badly hungover robot.
Adding to the confusion is the LongPen, the recent invention by Booker-prize winning novelist Margaret Atwood. Fed up of jetting around the world on book tours, she helped develop a device which links a computer screen to a distant robot and allows the author to sign a book from the comfort of another continent.
Last month, English novelist Kate Mosse just pipped Atwood to the first transatlantic book-signing. It means that Atwood has succeeded in bringing novelists closer to their ultimate aim, which is to spend as much time as possible alone in a darkened room.
The LongPen has been immediately disregarded by autograph collectors, who feel that a book signed by a robot, regardless of who is controlling it, cannot be of much value. And it's hard to see fans warming to the idea. You can't imagine punters queuing for hours just for the opportunity to babble nervously to a glorified Etch-A-Sketch.
It adds another layer of complication to the world of the autograph. Even the certificates in authenticity are being faked now, so that the casual buyer doesn't quite know what he's getting unless he actually sees the celebrity sign the thing.
There is an increasing number of people scouring the auctions in an attempt to unmask the forgers, but not so long ago one British expert went through the almost 200 autographs for sale on eBay that purported to be from Liverpool footballer Steven Gerrard. He decided that only two of them were authentic. Meaning that next time fans on the
Kop sing "There's only one Stevie Gerrard", they might want to add "and it comes with a genuine certificate of authenticity".