Henry Buxton Forman CB (11 July 1842 – 15 June 1917) was a Victorian-era bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller whose literary reputation is based on his bibliographies of Percy Shelley and John Keats.

In 1934 he was revealed to have been in a conspiracy with Thomas James Wise (1859–1937) to purvey large quantities of forged first editions of Georgian and Victorian authors.

At the age of ten months his family moved to Teignmouth in Devon and he was educated at a Royal Naval School in New Cross where Edmund Gosse was a contemporary and lifelong acquaintance although not an intimate.

This resulted in a friendly relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a fateful encounter with another poet Richard Hengist Horne, the subject of an early known forgery.

[3] His passion for Shelley and Keats resulted in collaborative work with others and articles on a number of minor poets such as Thomas Wade and Charles Jeremiah Wells.

[1] It was the start of a full scale conspiracy with numerous forgeries over the next fifteen years that were printed in London with templates that stated otherwise.

Many of these forgeries were sold by Buxton Forman [though there is little published evidence of sales] and Wise to collectors across the English speaking world and it would be forty years later that their fraud would be discovered by John Carter.

Most of the notebooks ended up being sold to American collectors, a striking indication of the popularity of Shelley at the turn of the twentieth century in the USA.

The frontispiece portrait of Shelley is in fact a copy of Leonardo da Vinci's Head of Christ with slight alterations.

Forman died after a long illness on 15 June 1917 and his ashes were sprinkled on the River Teign, which flows near his Devon childhood home.

He left his funeral instructions in a published verse: The exposure of Harry Buxton Forman as a forger in 1934 was driven by two booksellers, Graham Pollard and John Carter.

In addition, the typeface in minor respects indicated a late 19th Century use, and via some sterling detective work Carter and Pollard traced the printing to Richard Clay and Sons.