Books and films about document history worth reading

If you are interested in the broader context of identity documents — where they came from, how security features developed, the history of document fraud — there is a surprisingly rich body of books and films on the subject. Here are the ones I have found genuinely educational.

Books

Abagnale's "Catch Me If You Can" is the most famous, but take it with a substantial grain of salt — the veracity of the memoir is disputed. More reliable is "The Art of the Heist" by Myles Connor, which covers document forgery in the context of art crime with more factual grounding. For a dry but authoritative treatment, "Document Security" by Robin Sherwood provides an actual technical reference on printing techniques and anti-counterfeiting measures across different document types.

Jonathan Littell's academic papers on identity document security, published through various government security printing conferences, are dense but contain the most accurate technical information available publicly on how modern document security features are designed and specified.

Documentaries

The BBC documentary "The Great Train Robbery: The Hidden Truth" covers the document aspects of the robbery's aftermath without sensationalizing. "Art and Craft" (2014) is a documentary about a prolific museum art forger that has interesting parallels to document replication — the psychology and the craft aspects translate directly.

Academic sources

The AAMVA publishes technical standards documents for US driver's license formats. Some of these are publicly available and give more technical detail on barcode format, mag stripe encoding, and design specifications than anything else you can find without security clearance. Not light reading, but accurate.

The historical interest in this space is underappreciated. Identity documents are one of the oldest and most continuously evolving technologies in human society.

The intersection of document history, printing technology, and security feature development is a genuinely rich area that gets almost no popular attention. Most of the best material is in academic and conference publications rather than books written for general audiences, which makes the research slightly more effort but the information considerably more accurate.