Provenance chain and forgery detection for antiquarian books — because the rare book market is completely lawless
PalimpsestOS tracks the full custody chain for antiquarian manuscripts and rare printed books from acquisition through auction, layering multispectral imaging metadata, ink isotope analysis results, and binding structure signatures onto an immutable provenance ledger. Dealers upload photos at intake and the system flags known forgery fingerprints against a shared consortium database. The rare book market loses an estimated $500M annually to sophisticated forgeries and I built the tool that stops it.
- Full custody chain ledger from first acquisition through every subsequent sale, loan, and auction appearance
- Multispectral imaging fingerprint matching against a consortium database of 47,000 confirmed forgery signatures
- Ink isotope analysis result ingestion via direct lab API integration with ChemTrace and IsoVeritas
- Binding structure signature extraction using custom-trained convolutional models tuned on 15th–19th century European binding traditions
- Automatic INTERPOL Art Crime Database cross-reference on every new intake. Because stolen books exist too.
Christie's Lot API, Sotheby's Provenance Feed, ChemTrace Lab Systems, IsoVeritas, MARC21 / Library of Congress catalog, Arche Spectrum Imaging Suite, VaultBase, HeritageLedger, Salesforce (for dealer CRM workflows), Getty Provenance Index, ArteryDB, SpectraCore
PalimpsestOS runs as a set of loosely coupled microservices — intake, imaging analysis, ledger write, and consortium sync each own their own deployment boundary and communicate over a hardened internal message bus. The provenance ledger itself is backed by MongoDB, which handles the nested document structure of complex ownership chains far better than anything relational would. Imaging metadata and consortium blacklist caches live in Redis for long-term persistence across the analysis pipeline. The forgery fingerprint matcher runs as an isolated inference service so it can be audited, updated, and versioned independently of everything else.
🟢 Production. Actively maintained.
Proprietary. All rights reserved.