My my my, what have we here
A little over a year ago, I made a comment on what I considered to be a way of separating credulous homebuyers from their money; the definition of "True Craftsman" as a way to piggyback Gustav Stickley's houses up to being the sort of overpriced shrine that too many of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs have become.
The definition is fairly nebulous. Mr. Stickley published a magazine called The Craftsman, which contained house plans, furniture plans, and various articles discussing his ideas for simple living. He also had a standing offer to the subscribers to his magazine that they could get, for free, one set of architectural drawings so they could build houses based on the plans published in The Craftsman.
The idea with these drawings was that people would get them, tweak them for their needs, and build houses from them. And they'd occasionally hand off the plans to other people who'd use them as a basis for their own houses. Now, the whole "True Craftsman" scam here is that someone wrote to The Craftsman for a copy of the plans and used them as a basis for their house, that makes a "True Craftsman". If those plans were then handed to someone else (same plans, same Gustav Stickley, and remember that the whole idea was that the homebuilder could tweak them for their needs,) the resulting house would NOT be a "True Craftsman."
Heaven forbid that someone could build a house based on plans published in The Craftsman and call it a Craftsman house. You'd almost think that a large cache of Stickley architectural drawings were floating around out there and unless some absolutely stupid classification scheme was popularised people would be able to build houses from those drawings and "destroy" the value of the houses that were built earlier.
Well, it turns out that Columbia University has got a large stack of genuine (in many cases signed by Mr. Stickley) architectural drawings, so if you want (and can go through the wall of fire that the people at Columbia will put up if you ask to reproduce the blueprints as a basis for your own house) you can do pretty much exactly what people did 100 years ago; take real drawings from The Craftsman, have a local architect tweak them for your needs, and have a "False Craftsman" that has the same (or closer) relationship to The Craftsman magazine as the older "True Craftsman" houses that are already out there.
All you have to do is jump through the wall of fire.