It is a truth universally acknowledged that a publisher in pursuit of a buck or two might profitably ferret through literature's back alleys in search of work that is out of copyright. The sheer chutzpah with which this lucrative business can be carried out was exemplified last year with the publication of an anthology entitled Love Letters of Great Men. This elegant compendium of masculine passions first appeared in a touching bedroom scene between Carrie and Mr Big in the film Sex and the City; later, it proved pivotal in their reunion. It would, however, have remained a figment of the screenwriter's imagination had it not been for a canny editor at Macmillan, Ursula Doyle, who spotted the idea's potential and duly whipped up a simulacrum. Now, to the melodic accompaniment of barrel bottoms being scraped, comes its inevitable sequel: Love Letters of Great Women.

So who are these Great Women who have penned such touching epistles? "It is a sad fact," explains Doyle in her introduction, "that the Greatness of many of the women in this collection rests either on who they married or to whom they gave birth." This is faintly disingenuous. It is an eccentric door policy indeed that ushers in Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron's lover, but excludes her half-sister, the rather more interesting Mary Shelley. Queen Victoria and Anne Boleyn are both present at the party, but not that prodigious flirt Virginia Woolf, nor the medieval abbess Héloïse, whose extensive correspondence with her lover, Abélard, is rarely left out of anthologies of this sort.

This is not to suggest that Doyle has failed to unearth some gems or that the anthology is dull. Katherine Mansfield's samples are particularly entertaining. "I suppose I exaggerate  but I'd plunge into the Seine  or lie on a railway line  rather than lose a letter," she gushes to her soon-to-be husband, John Middleton Murry, a declaration that has been amusingly juxtaposed with one of the iciest dismissals to a rival that I have ever read.

In fact, it is Doyle's willingness to deflate sentiment that makes this collection appealing, though describing Emily Dickinson's mysterious personal life as "fertile ground for impertinent speculation and half-baked psychoanalysis" while gaily reprinting her private correspondence is perhaps a little harsh.

But impertinent speculation and half-baked psychoanalysis certainly sell books and they are the order of the day in Once Again to Zelda, a terrifically titled investigation into literary dedications that fails to live up to the brilliance of its premise. In the hands of an erudite and witty bookworm  Anne Fadiman, say  the revelation of these secret stories could have proved eminently entertaining without leaving the reader feeling as if he has watched a neighbour undress.

Marlene Wagman-Geller, a self-declared bibliophile, has, instead, concocted a grotesquely salacious mishmash of biographical rumour and speculation: lit crit from the school of Hello! magazine. This book is so glib and insinuating, so monumentally daffy, that it could well become a classic of its kind.

Despite a somewhat lackadaisical approach to research (the bibliography includes no less than 61 discrete Wikipedia entries), Wagman-Geller is on undeniably fertile ground. Who, for example, could fail to delight in the knowledge that Jacqueline Susann dedicated Valley of the Dolls to her poodle or be moved that post-1961 editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover are dedicated "to the 12 jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of 'Not Guilty'". The problem is that, lapdogs aside, novels tend to be dedicated to people with whom the writer is more intimately engaged, thereby licensing an exhaustive trawl through illegitimacy, incest, suicide, insanity, homosexuality, betrayal and murder. One wonders why they bothered to write fiction at all.

These gruesome tales are capped by Wagman-Geller's determination to make titles stand as epitaphs. For Virginia Woolf, "tragically, there was no lighthouse to guide her through the darkness", while for poor, miserable Carson McCullers, "maybe in the next world, unlike this one, her heart no longer had to be 'a lonely hunter'".

It's enough to put one off literary ephemera for good. Thank heavens, then, for Telling Tales, Melissa Katsoulis's genial history of forgeries, hoaxes and general skulduggery in the world of books. Katsoulis has made valiant attempts to apply a scholarly framework to her collection of tall tales and their tellers, but what really comes across is her pleasure at their wayward, wicked schemes. Many of the hoaxers are tragic figures, too broke or lowly to win literary renown by ordinary methods; too talented or dogged to give up. Some are more malicious, like the money-grabbing Holocaust hoaxers whose false witness has distressing consequences for real survivors. A surprising number are Australian or have absent fathers. Among the latter category is that most famous of forgers, William Ireland, who created a seemingly endless supply of Shakespeariana, starting with a mortgage deed and culminating in a self-penned and apparently dreadful play, solely, Katsoulis claims, to woo his critical father.

Often it seems astonishing that the stories were ever believed. Take Grey Owl, a tanned, moccasin-wearing middle-class Englishman who passed for decades as a Native American, even lecturing to the Queen on the perils of industrialisation. Then there's Marlo Morgan, a greedy new ager whose Mutant Message Down Under cashed in on her claims to have been kidnapped and initiated by a mysterious band of Aboriginals. The book made her a millionaire, despite being denounced by real Aboriginal elders, not to mention being "based, seemingly, on a smattering knowledge about Native Americans and a thorough grounding in Crocodile Dundee".

While Katsoulis has little patience with such exploits, she delights in tricks designed to puncture pomposity or expose the self-regard of a particular artistic or literary scene. These include the acclaimed modernist poet whose entire oeuvre turned out to have been tossed off over a few stray afternoons and the Greek literary hero who became renowned across Canada, later revealed to have been played by a "dentist in a funny hat". As for the stooges, it turns out that Oprah is a serial victim and James Frey wasn't the first false misery memoirist to win her over with his crocodile tears.

The most delicious story here is also one of the most recent. In 2004, Bevis Hillier, the venerable biographer of John Betjeman, was horrified to discover his arch rival, AN Wilson, was also planning a biography of the poet. Spotting an opportunity to pay Wilson back for a series of insults and slights over the years, he decided to forge a love letter from Betjeman to a (real) woman by the name of Honor Tracy.

This sexy missive, which included the immortal line "Tinkerty-tonk, my darling", was in fact a cunning acrostic, the first letter of each sentence spelling out a hidden message to his enemy. To Hillier's "jig-dancing, air-punching" glee, the letter duly appeared in Wilson's biography. And the message encoded within it? AN WILSON IS A SHIT. I expect to see it anthologised in Fake Love Letters of Great Men before the year is out.