Timothy Touchett, an aspiring novelist, moves from Boston to New York City in the late 1990s. Timothy works as a waiter in an Italian restaurant, and he studies the lives and craft of famous authors for inspiration. He fears that he does not have any stories worthy of a novel, so his studies serve as a distraction. Peter Pennybrook approaches Timothy one afternoon at the New York Public Library, while Timothy is studying F. Scott Fitzgerald’s signature in a letter to the famous editor Maxwell Perkins. Pennybrook offers Timothy a job in his bookstore, which Timothy accepts, excited to work closer to his chosen field.

On Timothy’s first day of work, Pennybrook asks about Fitzgerald’s signature discovers that Timothy has a talent for forging signatures with additional elements of emotion and style, which reveal the real signer’s position in life. Pennybrook pays Timothy $50 to forge the signature of 20th-century American novelist John Dos Passos—ostensibly for a terminally ill friend. Timothy then begins regularly forging the signatures of dead authors for Pennybrook, treating himself to a fancy dinner and wine with the crisp $50 bills, which remind him of the $10 bills his grandmother used to send him on his birthday.