CHAPTER FIVE

The Hunt Is Up, the Fields Are Fragrant

Building a Collection

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The hunt is up, the moon is bright and gray,

The fields are fragrant, and the woods are green.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

And I have horse will follow where the game

Makes way and runs like swallows o’er the plain.

Titus Andronicus, 2.2.1–2, 26–27

ACCORDING TO THE ENDOWMENT created in their wills, the Folgers established their library “for the promotion and diffusion of knowledge in regard to the history and writings of Shakespeare.”1 The Folger Shakespeare Library has expanded considerably beyond the collection on the shelves (and still in storage cases) when the facility opened in 1932. Nevertheless, that original collection is a dazzling array of objects: books, manuscripts, essays, pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, playbills, prompt books, autograph letters, autographs, letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, commonplace books, scrapbooks, sheet music, phonograph records, maps, charts, public documents, prints, drawings, engravings, woodcuts, oil paintings, watercolors, mezzotints; furniture, building models, coins, weapons, armor, heraldic documents, tapestries, musical instruments, globes, costumes, scenic designs, stage properties, statues, busts, carvings, miniatures, medallions, figurines, relics, curios, works in stained glass, bronze, ivory, wood, china, ceramics, and marble.

The main thrust of the Folgers’ collection was literary. They assembled a full range of literary works produced from 1476, the introduction of printing in England, to 1714, the death of Queen Anne. This is approximately the same period embraced by the more recent term, “early modern age.” They enhanced that literary collection by seeking out other types of books from the early modern era, on politics, law, history, medicine, philosophy, psychology, travel, and the sciences. The couple wanted to offer students and scholars classics on European life to complement and illumine the basic Shakespeare collection. While they concentrated on antiquarian volumes, the Folgers also acquired contemporary books that bore on their special interests.

Before the library was dedicated in 1932, its first director, William Adams Slade, defined what the Folgers had given to the nation: “The most complete and most valuable single collection of Shakespearean works in the United States or anywhere in the world.”2 The Folgers succeeded in gathering as many copies as they could of the Bard’s plays: no fewer than 1,400 different copies of the collected works, amounting to 9,700 volumes. No other library in the world owns as many Shakespeare quartos. A quarto, which has been likened in size to a mass-market paperback, is made by folding a sheet of paper twice to yield eight pages [or four leaves] per sheet. The Folgers purchased 800 copies of Hamlet, more than 500 of Macbeth, and over 400 of both Romeo & Juliet and The Merchant of Venice. These figures include separate editions, translations, and duplicate copies.

The Folgers succeeded in amassing nearly two hundred Shakespeare folios—the four seventeenth-century editions of his collected plays—far more than any other library in the world. A folio is a large book size that consists of sheets of paper folded once to yield four pages (or two leaves) per sheet. The founders were particularly pleased to secure volumes that had belonged to well-known persons, from kings to literary giants, and volumes that contained interesting marginalia: comments, changes, interpretations written in the margins. Consider a few examples of their ceaseless acquisition:

First Folio (1623): 82 copies, including ones owned by King George III, Queen Victoria, William I King of Prussia, David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, and Edwin Forrest.

Second Folio (1632): 58 copies, including ones owned by Elizabeth (daughter of King James I), William Pitt, and Horace Walpole.

Third Folio (1663–64): 24 copies, including one probably owned by Alexander Pope.

Fourth Folio (1685): 36 copies, including ones owned by William Morris, John Ruskin, Edward Fitzgerald, and George Eliot.

The Folgers purposely sought books in categories that would enrich scholarly study. Source books are works that Shakespeare is thought to have used in composing his poems and plays. In addition to familiar source books by Plutarch and Holinshed, the Folgers purchased Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynd (1590), which inspired As You Like It, and Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), which influenced The Winter’s Tale. They tracked down Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598), which the Bard copied when he wrote, in As You Like It, “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”

The Folgers collected more than five thousand allusion books, volumes that contain references to Shakespeare or his writings. Concentrating on works published before 1700, they secured a rare copy of Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte (1592), which derides Shakespeare as an “upstart crow” in the earliest known reference to him in print. Their copy of Thomas Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece (1600) reflects inspiration from Shakespeare’s poem, Lucrece (1594). One of Shakespeare’s most popular works, Lucrece went through six editions during his lifetime.

Association books once belonged to theatrical, literary or political figures of renown. The celebrities marked passages that particularly impressed them or added words reflecting contemporary interpretations. The stellar list of former owners in this collection of several hundred Shakespeare editions covers three centuries of literary and political luminaries: John Dryden, Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, Charles Lamb, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Coleridge, William Thackeray, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Bernard Shaw, Edwin Booth, Ellen Terry, George Washington, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, King Louis XIV, Napoleon III, and King George IV. The last association book Folger purchased was the pocket edition of Shakespeare that Walt Whitman always carried.

A prompter uses prompt books to remind actors of their lines. A director fills interleaving pages in a prompt book with stage instructions: diagrams indicating positioning of actors; textual cuts or revisions; entrances and exits; lighting or sound effects; scenery changes. The Folgers collected 2,500 prompt books from the libraries of, among other theater greats of three centuries, David Garrick, Edwin Booth, Sir Henry Irving, Robert B. Mantell, Samuel Phelps, and Augustin Daly.

Extra-illustrated books reflect a curious collector’s fetish begun by James Granger in the late 1700s. A collector bought a book or set of books and removed the bindings. Then he or she would add various items associated with the author and title—playbills, watercolors, portraits, prints, and autograph letters. Often with the help of a professional inlayer, the book was then rebound, swollen many times thicker than the original. The Folgers bought a “grangerized” set of Shakespeare owned by Augustin Daly, an eight-volume set metastasized to forty-two volumes. In another favorite acquisition, two volumes of David Garrick had become seventeen.

David Garrick was a special object of the Folgers’ passion. The dramatist, actor, and manager of the Drury Lane Theatre in London celebrated Shakespeare and his works. Folger admired the “glorious actor” for, in his opinion, having stood by the early quartos and folios and not wandered into the territory of remodeling or rewriting the Bard’s plays.3 The Folgers’ Garrick collection numbered several thousand items including four hundred autograph letters; one hundred manuscripts of poems, prologues, and epilogues; ten oil portraits (three by Sir Joshua Reynolds), as well as Garrick’s journal, marriage certificate, silver table service, death mask, and armchair designed by William Hogarth, the last item holding a place of honor in the library’s new reading room. Twenty-five additional autograph letters never reached Folger’s mailbox because they went down with the British ship SS Arabia, torpedoed by a German submarine in 1916.4 As Folger insured book parcels against all risks including war, strikes, riots, and civil commotions, he received reimbursement; nevertheless the collector remained mournful about his lost prizes.

Folger always intended to allot Sir Francis Bacon a prominent place in his library, given his important contribution to English literature and thought. Rosenbach called the Folger collection of Baconiana “the most extensive ever gathered.”⁵ Henry became a member of the Bacon Society of America at its creation in 1923. (Emily’s brother Francis was named after Francis Bacon.) Folger purchased books (including over four hundred from William T. Smedley’s library), notes, and autograph letters related to Bacon. He bought several items from Bacon’s personal library, many with the author’s annotations. He questioned whether some of these were genuine, however, and declined to buy certain Bacon items if their relationship to Shakespeare seemed too remote.

Shakespeare authorship was a related category for collection. Who wrote the works generally attributed to Shakespeare? Was it really William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon? Or could it have been Francis Bacon; Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford; or someone else? The Folgers were convinced that students and scholars would make good use of their significant library about the controversy. Indeed, one of these recent scholars, James Shapiro, has written a comprehensive study of the issue entitled Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010). Emily and Henry, however, harbored no doubts. The year before he died, Folger wrote to his British book dealer, Broadbent, that “I … am coming towards the end of my interest in Bacon; for all the books I have seen, read by him, tend to prove that he could not have been in any way responsible for the Shakespeare Plays.”⁶

Folger bought as many books from Ben Jonson’s library as he thought he could afford. Part of Folger’s interest in Jonson—the celebrated seventeenth-century poet, playwright, and writer of court masques—stemmed from the publication in 1616 of Jonson’s collected works, a precursor to Shakespeare’s First Folio of plays. Rosenbach believed another reason was that Jonson left so many illuminating marginal notes in his own hand, after marking on the title-page of the books he acquired, “Su[m] Ben Jonson” (I am Ben Jonson), followed by his motto “Tanquam Explorator” (Like an explorer).

Relatively few libraries developed at the time were based, as was Folger’s, on affirming the supreme importance of manuscripts. “Our collection is very rich in manuscripts, as I have felt that they are of really greater interest than printed books.”7 Although manuscripts with literary and dramatic interest prevail, others address topics like medicine, science, politics, royalty and the court, economics, religion, astrology, heraldry, military science, and travel. The Folgers acquired samples of different kinds of manuscript hands: among them, the italic or Italian hand (increasingly popular in England after 1550); the secretary or “workaday hand,” used primarily in the sixteenth century for governmental and private business, recordkeeping, correspondence, and literary composition; and court hands such as the Chancery, the Common Pleas, and the Exchequer.⁸ In addition to the hands cited above, Preston and Yeandle discuss textura, bastard secretary, and combinations of italic and secretary.

The Folgers purchased in 1924 a series of early fourteenth-century manuscripts of Aristotle, the first of which was called Physica. Interspersed in the margins were small pointing hands—often with long index fingers—indicating an important passage to remember. To indicate this mark, William Sherman borrowed the term “manicula” from manuscript catalogers and popularized it in his own writings.⁹ One day in the Folger reading room I beckoned Bill over to my table to show him a document in which Folger had used the manicula in his own notetaking. In 1922, the Folgers acquired a letter (ca. 1590) from Queen Elizabeth to “mon tres cher et bon frere et cousin” King Henri IV of France in which the Queen, from personal experience, advises restraint in dealing with strife between Catholics and Protestants. In 1897 the Folgers bought the “Dering Manuscript,” a five-act play (ca. 1623) that conflates parts 1 and 2 of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Sir Edward Dering organized an amateur performance of the play in his Kent home, demonstrating early interest in Shakespeare. This is the earliest extant manuscript of a play by Shakespeare.

Musical literature and period instruments also form an important part of the Folger collection. Henry Folger was a singer, organist, and enthusiastic member of the music committees at his college and church. He wrote that had he not been a collector of Shakespeare he would have specialized in early music. No surprise, then, that about a thousand titles concern “Shakespeare and Music.” Thomas Morley’s First Booke of Ayres (1600) contains the original setting of the ditty, “It was a lover and his lass,” which appeared in As You Like It. Composer John Dowland’s first (1600), second (1600), and third book of songs (1603) grace the collection.¹⁰ From the Arnold Dolmetsch collection of ancient musical instruments, the Folgers bought a lute made by Michele Harton of Padua in 1598, an Italian pentagonal virginal, an Italian clavichord of cypress wood, an Italian clavicembalo, an English treble viol from 1570, and an English viola de gamba.

For Henry and Emily, their painting collection was never a priority. First, far and away their major dealings were with bibliophiles, not connoisseurs of art. Second, while they acquired over two hundred paintings, they spent more than $2,000 for only seven of them. Third, Folger admitted he was no discerning judge of visual art, buying objects “when they were cheap.”11 As one would expect, most subjects were scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. The collection also contained several Shakespeare portraits. Some artists were renowned: Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, Thomas Sully, Henry Fuseli, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and Benjamin West. Research by William L. Pressly has demonstrated, however, that as many as half the paintings purchased by the couple were misattributed. The Folgers mistakenly thought they owned Gainsboroughs and Turners.

Finding them curious and interesting, the Folgers bought examples of plagiarism of William Shakespeare. Folger believed the Shakespeare library ought to be complete. He wrote to Emily’s older sister, “in a collection completeness outweighs merit.”¹² One doesn’t judge, or set aside, only the true, the best, the most beautiful; everything counts. They paid as much as £3,800 for Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris (1594), the only known copy of a plagiarized version of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, first published in 1593. They purchased several volumes of Shakespeare forgeries by William-Henry Ireland published around 1800. Folger branded Ireland a “scamp.” Nevertheless, he thought their library must have the forger’s book, titled Confessions.

Closely related to plagiarism was the constant lure of obtaining a genuine Shakespeare signature. The Chicago autograph dealer Oliver Barrett dangled more bait than anyone. Barrett visited Folger at 26 Broadway to discuss their approaches to collecting. As the visitor later put it, “Folger said he wanted Shakespeare, I wanted Lincoln. I let him have my Shakespeare and I bought Lincoln items I wanted.”¹³ The two collectors agreed to help each other out. Folger noted a bit regretfully that it would have been easier to collect Lincoln than Shakespeare.

Their parallel pursuit, however, had distinct limits. When Barrett agreed with some reluctance to sell him a Shakespeare signature for $25,000, Folger responded curtly, “I do not feel like taking your Shakespeare signature at the price you put on it. I would like to have it, but am too much of a business man to pay what seems to be such an excessive figure for it.”¹⁴ The signature in question had belonged to Charles Frederick Gunther, the German inventor of caramel candies, who died in 1920.

Folger purchased a copy of Plutarch’s Lives (1579) with a signature “William Shakespeare” atop the first page of text. Could it be genuine? Folger librarians called in Theodore Hordyczak, an early architectural photographer in Washington, to photograph documents from the Folger vaults in 1932 that included “two alleged Shakespeare autographs.”15 Later, all were judged to be forgeries. The Folger Library does not yet possess a Shakespeare signature considered genuine.

Another collector’s item that Folger rarely declined was any piece of the legendary mulberry tree that stood in New Place, the Bard’s last residence in Stratford, supposedly planted by Shakespeare himself from a cutting. A hundred and fifty years later, the owner of New Place destroyed the huge tree for firewood. A local craftsman and clever entrepreneur, Thomas Sharp, purchased many logs, soon launching a cottage industry carving Shakespeare memorabilia out of the ancient mulberry. Long before Folger, David Garrick and Ireland obtained every mulberry item within reach. Often the objects reproduced Shakespeare’s head, or a crest and shield, or mulberries and leaves. One has to wonder how many mulberry trees besides the Ur-tree went into these apparently endless curios.

From the Warwick Castle sale, Folger walked away with a mulberry thimble. He added a mulberry statuette from Sotheby’s and a tea caddy from Anderson Galleries. Then he came upon a mulberry goblet once in Garrick’s collection. By 1922, Folger declared to Michelmore and Company, “I have many articles carved from the mulberry tree, so am not inclined to try to secure any more.”¹⁶

Why then did the Folgers buy a mulberry cup in 1923, another goblet in 1926, a rolling pin in 1927, and an inkstand in 1929? Collectors have difficulty observing limits, and Emily loved such small objects. Relics, she wrote, “will help to enable us to catch the spirit of Shakespeare’s time. We have always thought of the library as being like a book with illustrations. Of course, the relics will serve that purpose; they will illustrate the poet’s text.”¹⁷ Emily later used the same curious metaphor, linking their building itself to a book, “the Library was to be the First Folio, illustrated.”¹⁸

The prize for the largest Folger collection in any category, hands down, goes to playbills, with a quarter of a million.¹⁹ Created in the eighteenth century, playbills are printed programs informing theater goers about an upcoming production.²⁰ They may include a cast list and information about scenes in the play. In the nineteenth century, playbills added advertisements. Most examples in the Folgers’ collection advertise upcoming Shakespeare performances. Folger bought his first big lot of eighteenth-century playbills in Boston, where 180,000 playbills became “a good load for two horses.”²¹

Although the Folgers were later reproached for failing to assemble enough basic reference materials for researchers, they did, in fact, purchase encyclopedias and dictionaries, including five editions from Shakespeare’s period of Withals’s English and Latin dictionary. They acquired 11,000 sales catalogs, 1,300 bibliographies, glossaries, and publications of learned societies. The Folgers accumulated the staggering figure of 92,000 books. Over forty years of collecting, that averages six books added every day.

In Making the Mummies Dance, Thomas Hoving—former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—identified three types of collectors: 1) those who buy every piece themselves, 2) those who get professional help, and 3) those who amass collections formed by other connoisseurs.22 The Folgers stand closer to the first category than to the second, far from the third. Henry Folger’s approach to collecting was a modern one. He valued marginalia in antiquarian volumes: comments or corrections, drawings or poems, additions to the text by famous or common readers, making the acquisition all the more interesting to scholars.

Just as the Folgers’ Shakespeare tale involves the love story of Emily and Henry and their shared devotion to the Bard, so too their collecting displays what Rosen-bach called “a romance about every one of his great purchases.”

Henry Folger bought his first rare book ten years after graduating from college. In 1889, he attended in person a book auction in New York City at Bangs and Company, the foremost auction house in America. The volume that caught his eye was a copy of Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio (1685). When he discovered that his bid of $107.50 was a winner, he realized he didn’t have the cash. He requested and easily obtained a one-month period of credit during which he paid in four installments. Thus began a forty-year Shakespearean hunt and half a century of figuring out how to pay for what caught his and Emily’s discerning fancy.

In 1896, Emily made a list of the 1,200 most coveted Shakespeare books with the goal of adding them to their collection.²³ In the left-hand margin, she ranked each item on a scale from “1” to “4.” As evidence of their collaboration, Henry penned the code for interpreting Emily’s categories:

1. I wish under any circumstances.

2. I lack but think I can get.

3. I have, but think there may be better than mine.

4. I do not wish.

The Folgers’ meticulous recordkeeping included detailed notes on each item’s condition. They were constantly on the lookout for a more perfect specimen of an object they already owned. The couple also recognized the need to establish limits, unlike many collectors who have a problem stopping. The disciplined couple relentlessly scoured the market for desired items. Their want-list contained a section for very special pieces for which they were willing to make extraordinary financial sacrifices.

The Folgers also found highly efficient ways to build their collection. While not excluding purchases from bookshop stock and individual books and manuscripts as they were offered, they concentrated on procuring through major book auctions in England and America. Rather than attending in person, Henry found it more efficient to go through professionals, book dealers who doubled as commission agents. This refined strategy paid off handsomely.

One example was their en bloc purchase in 1897 of the Warwick Castle Shakespeare Collection. Warwick Castle on the banks of the Avon in Warwickshire is known largely for its bloody history as a medieval fortress marked by intrigue, treachery, and murder. For the Folgers, however, Warwick Castle was only one room, the library, and its Shakespeare collection assembled in the 1850s and 1860s. In a rare talk to Amherst students after he received an honorary doctorate in 1914, Folger shared the reason why this collection meant so much to him. “The beautiful library of Shakespeareana from Warwick Castle, most comprehensive, is essentially valuable for its manuscripts, manuscripts about Shakespeare and his life, the original notebooks of early commentators, and best of all, early manuscript copies of the plays. Indeed, the catalog claims every known copy made before 1700. Until there appears a playhouse copy in Shakespeare’s handwriting or in that of one of his contemporaries, these must be accepted as of prime importance.”24

A rich backstory reveals the roles played by Folger and his agent, Henry Sotheran and Company, “Bookseller to the King.” The Earl of Warwick had never given much thought to selling the Shakespeare collection. The books had been unread and unappreciated since his father, who acquired them, died in 1893. However, by 1897, when Sotheran first approached him, the Earl had begun to think he’d rather have cash than old Shakespeare volumes.

Utmost secrecy surrounded a flurry of correspondence, which Folger signed with the code name “Golfer.” His messages use other coded terms: Roboro (telegram received); Obsono (offer is accepted); Aspicio (commission will be allowed of …).²⁵

Ultimately, with Folger’s persistence and resolve, the Earl accepted Folger’s price of £10,000 for the lot. Eight boxes of Warwick books duly arrived in New York, where Emily entered in her card catalog the relevant information on these gems, including a First Folio and twenty-six quartos. In their basement, the Folgers themselves repacked the Warwick trove, along with auction catalogs and relevant memoranda, and called the storage company to take them away. Emily’s careful accounting recorded their disposition: Cases 12–25, Room 5B14, Eagle Warehouse and Storage Company, Fulton Street, Brooklyn.

Yet another dramatic story began to unfold on the morning of January 11, 1905. As was his habit, Folger picked up the New York Times for his morning read. Above the fold on the right side of page 1, eight lines halted his gaze. “london, Wednesday, Jan. 11.—The Morning Leader’s Copenhagen correspondent reports the discovery at Lund, Sweden, of a book containing the text of Shakespeare’s ‘Titus Andronicus,’ printed in London in 1594. The oldest edition hitherto known is the 1600 quarto.” On his way to work that day, Folger stopped at a cable office and wired instructions to his trusted agent in London, Henry Sotheran, to dispatch a representative at once to Lund and obtain an option on the rediscovered Titus. Before the day was out, Sotheran, after confirming that a courier was en route, asked, “What is the highest you are willing to pay?”26

Folger couldn’t make up his mind. He spent three hours pacing lower Manhattan, stewing over the right figure. Finally, he wired back, “£2,000.” Over the course of the next few hours, two other hopeful buyers coincidentally offered exactly the same amount. Folger took home the prize, however, as his wire had arrived first, and he was prepared to pay cash. When the unique volume arrived, the Folgers were surprised to find it as new as when it had been purchased by playgoers for a few pence. Covered in soft, blue-gray paper, Titus had remained in its original wrapper for over 300 years. Folger placed it in his safest storage facility, the Franklin Trust Company, on March 10, 1905. The public did not see this rarity until 1936, when the Folger Shakespeare Library issued its first scholarly publication, a facsimile copy of Titus, which Charles Scribner’s Sons published for the trustees of Amherst College. The uniqueness of this volume lies in its status as the only surviving copy of the first printing of Titus, and thus the closest we are able to come to the Shakespeare holograph of the play, in this case, the dramatist’s foul papers, the bibliographic term used for the author’s working, marked-up manuscript. The volume is also one of only two Shakespeare quartos printed in 1594 (the other being Henry VI, Part 2). When compared to Q2, which was copied from it in 1600, the 1594 Quarto shows several missing lines at the end of Act 5, which were then supplied by the later compositor.

Several years later, Henry Sotheran was again on the prowl, this time for another major library known as the Halliwell-Phillipps Shakespearean Rarities. Sotheran knew that Folger coveted this collection when he bought the Warwick Castle library. Alas, another American Shakespeare buyer, a Rhode Island railroad magnate from Providence, Marsden Perry, managed to acquire it in 1897. Perry was a collector with wide interests: porcelain, furniture, Dürer and Rembrandt paintings, as well as Shakespeare. Henry Sotheran patiently and cunningly followed not only the market but also his clients’ fortunes. In 1908, he alerted Folger: “It is common talk in London that Mr. Marsden Perry has been very seriously affected by the financial disaster in America.”²⁷ It was a false alarm; Perry wasn’t ready to sell. Only more than a decade after the Panic of 1907 did Perry finally decide to sell his Shakespeare collection, but not to the Folgers. Rosenbach bought it in 1919. The Philadelphia bookman did not deliberate long about which Shakespeare collector—Henry E. Huntington, William A. White, or Folger—to approach next for a huge deal.

“To 26 Broadway,” Rosenbach commanded the cab driver. A familiar visitor to the “Tower of Secrecy,” the bookseller was whisked to the thirteenth floor. When he asked the secretary outside Folger’s office, room 1300, whether he could see Mr. Folger, he learned that the Standard Oil executive committee was in session. He scribbled a note and asked that it be delivered urgently to the collector. The secretary hesitated before opening the heavy padded door. Few, if any, had ever interrupted an executive committee meeting.

A moment later, the president of Standard Oil of New York rushed out of the meeting. He blurted, “Will you give me the first choice? I particularly want the 1619 volume that belonged to Edward Gwynn [seventeenth-century bookbuyer].”28 Well acquainted with the Halliwell-Philipps collection, Folger knew what he wanted most, the Pavier quartos, the only known complete copy in its original binding of the first attempt at a collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. It was published four years before the First Folio, by the same printer, William Jaggard. Containing falsified title-pages, it is sometimes known as the false folio. Rosenbach, who relished the index written in Gwynn’s quaint handwriting, was only too happy to comply.²⁹ As did Folger, Rosenbach considered the Pavier quartos the crown jewels of the Mardsen Perry collection.³⁰ With the treasure now within his grasp, Folger cleared his throat, straightened his tie, and returned to join the oil company directors.

Was Folger guilty as charged by Rockefeller (see prologue) of paying $100,000 for the Pavier quartos volume? How helpful for us now that Folger saved his cancelled checks! After a voyage from New York by train on July 12, 1919, the Folgers had settled into their usual accommodations in Hot Springs, Virginia, for their customary six-week summer stay. On July 21, the Folgers opened a Western Union telegram from Rosenbach: “Perry deal closed. Your secretary requested me to telegraph you. Pls wire me about payment.”³¹ The same day, Folger dispatched a telegram back to Rosenbach: “Check has been mailed direct to you in Philadelphia.”³² Folger followed up with a letter, “I have just telegraphed you … Enclosed please find check for $100,000, as agreed.”³³

However, no invoice explains exactly which item or items that check covered. Big collectors often bought entire libraries or lots. On July 23, Rosenbach sent an acknowledgment while adding a clarification. “Your check for $100,000 to be applied on account of your purchase of $128,500, of books from the Perry collection came to hand this morning.”³⁴ On July 28, 1919, Folger wrote a second check to Rosenbach for $28,500.³⁵

TABLE 3
Highest-Value Volumes Purchased from Perry Collection, July 1919, with Itemized Prices Penciled in by Folger

Shakespeare title	Price (in 1919 dollars)
Quartos, 1619. Edward Gwynn copy	50,000
Henry VI, Part 2, 1594. 1st part Contention	18,500
Venus & Adonis, 1595	15,000
Pericles, 1611	12,500
Richard III, 1605. William Penn copy	7,500

Note: The Gwynn volume of 1619, priced at $50,000, or $650,000 in 2011 dollars, is one of the most expensive volumes Folger ever bought.

Suddenly, with the plural, “books,” the amount of $100,000 takes on a wholly different meaning: The Pavier quartos appear to be part of a lot equaling $128,500. On July 29, Rosenbach wrote Folger, “I delivered yesterday to Mr. Welsh books and manuscripts according to our agreement, and received a check from him for $28,500.”36 Now we learn that not only books but manuscripts made up the lot, and the total cost to Folger was more than $100,000. In the Rosenbach Co. Perry Library file, Folger left behind many notes and calculations, lists of books with some titles crossed out or the marking, “other items omitted,” such that it is not easy to figure out which books he finally bought for the amount in question. Folger was constantly haggling to lower the price; Rosenbach would “regret exceedingly” and they would haggle some more. Perhaps Rosenbach and Folger determined the final deal over a telephone conversation. In addition, Folger often bought books, and returned them if they were not to his liking.

The figure, $50,000, that Folger marked in pencil, appears on two typed documents entitled “Items to be retained from Perry Library,” against the item, “Quartos Gwynn vol. 1619.”³⁷ Nowhere in the Folger lists does one read $100,000 against this item. Rosenbach and Folger both signed one (undated) list of twelve items, without individual prices indicated but with this handwritten notation, “125,000 for lot.”³⁸

Rockefeller was not alone in reading that Folger had paid $100,000 for a book. Several newspapers carried the report. World Magazine published an article under the title: “The Costliest Book in the World, the unique Gwynn volume of nine Shakespeare plays on the original quarto reprint of 1619—Purchased by H. C. Folger, an American collector, for $100,000.”³⁹ The article did not escape the eye of a fraternity brother of Folger at Amherst who had joined him working for Charles Pratt. After Walter Mossman questioned the veracity of the news report, Folger admitted, “Dear Mossman, I did buy the book referred to, but paid only a fraction of the price named—as you doubtless had guessed knowing me as you do.”⁴⁰ Folger chose the word “fraction” carefully. And he loathed mention in the press of prices he might have paid.

Check for $100,000 Henry Folger sent the Rosenbach Company on July 22, 1919, to purchase several rare books from the Marsden Perry Library. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Rosenbach, who was not beneath divulging book sale prices to journalists, wrote Folger with characteristic panache, “I want to congratulate you upon obtaining, what I consider, the FINEST SHAKESPEARIAN VOLUME IN EXISTENCE.”41 Edward Gwynn, the seventeenth-century owner of the volume, had his name stamped on the five-by-seven-inch wrinkled calf cover that contained crinkled pages. An image of the Pavier volume may be seen today in the Frank O. Salisbury portrait of Folger, which hangs in the library’s Gail Kern Paster reading room—the one book the collector chose to hold in his hands for the sitting.

The Halliwell-Phillipps collection was now in Folger’s hands, destined for the shelves of the Folger library. It consisted of four elements: early portraits of Shakespeare; artistic illustrations connected with Shakespeare; contemporaneous documents; and personal relics of the poet. Folger was especially interested in the fourth category, which contained title deeds to estates of which Shakespeare was owner or part owner.

Especially strong in manuscripts, the collection also included as many as sixty Folios. Also in the collection, the contents of 328 drawers, composed of “heaps of loose scraps of paper,” posing a huge research challenge. But the Halliwell-Phillipps Shakespearean Rarities was the prize that almost got away. When he was less wealthy, Folger had suggested that the collection be donated to an American university. In 1895, he wrote his boss, John D. Rockefeller, suggesting that he buy it for $50,000. “My excuse for writing this at length is to beg permission to suggest that this magnificent collection be bought for the Chicago University … Had I the means, I would not hesitate as a business man, to buy the collection, with the expectation that the profit on the reproductions and the money for the originals if sold at auction would net a handsome margin on the investment.”42

Biographer Ron Chernow reminds us that in 1895 Rockefeller pledged $3 million for the University of Chicago’s endowment.⁴³ What was another $50,000? Folger tried one more plea: “I trust before you come to an adverse decision you will let me have a word with you.” The titan declined. Unschooled, Rockefeller was no man of books.

S. R. Christie-Miller was a voracious British book collector of the nineteenth century. When his collection sold as part of the Britwell-Court Library, it took fifty-three days at auction over a full decade-–1916 to 1926—for Sotheby’s to sell off the works. Folger sent bids first to one of the preeminent London book dealers, Bernard Quaritch, and subsequently to Rosenbach, to represent him at several sessions. Folger saved newspaper clippings after the March 1923 sale, during which Rosenbach carried off three-quarters of the items sold. The Brits labeled Rosenbach “The Invader,” according to the New York World, and the Times Literary Supplement lamented that so many British treasures, sold for extravagant prices, would never come on the market again.

After announcing, then revising his bids to Rosenbach several times—and competing with J. P. Morgan, Henry E. Huntington, and William A. White—in 1924 Folger obtained much of his want list, including Lucrece (1632) for which he paid $33,144. Rosenbach ordered a specially constructed steel box to carry the treasures safely back to America. Ultimately, Folger kept the Lucrece, along with the 1924 Britwell-Court catalog, in his office safe at 26 Broadway. Folger had a special affection for the early printed copies of Shakespeare’s poems and probably paid so much due to the rarity of this Lucrece edition, the last to be published before the outbreak of the English Civil War. He would come to own copies of the first edition of 1594, as well as those of 1600, 1624, 1632, and 1655.

The circuitous means that enlarged the Folger collection made for another memorable story centered on Brooklyn book collector William A. White. White was renowned for having agreed to part with very few literary treasures during his lifetime. One transaction took place spontaneously at his home, 158 Columbia Street in Brooklyn, in June 1922. He confided to his dinner guest, Dr. Rosenbach, “I’ve never sold a Shakespeare quarto in my life, but I’m sorely tempted. I’m itching to tell my skeptical family that I wasn’t such a fool when I invested money in what they considered playthings.” Rosenbach was at first incredulous when White asked him to name his price for his third edition of Richard II (1598). The book dealer knew that White’s volume was not “a” third edition, but “the only complete” copy of that third edition in the world.⁴⁴ After White accepted on the spot the Doctor’s offer of $45,000, he divulged to his guest, “In 1890 I paid $348 for it.”⁴⁵

Rosenbach immediately sent Folger a letter marked “very confidential.” The opening salvo described the volume newly added to his inventory: “With the exception of the Titus Andronicus (1594), it is the only unique Shakespeare quarto published in the sixteenth century.” He continued, “I am making you the first offer.”46 Folger and Rosenbach agreed on a price of $55,000. In less than a week, the canny dealer had made a profit of $10,000 on a single book. Generally the doctor’s invoices included transportation costs. This time, after shuttling the three miles from White’s home to Folger’s, Rosenbach refrained from billing for the ten-cent taxi fare as he usually did.

When White died in May 1927 at age eighty-four, his family hired Dr. Rosen-bach to dispose of his library, which Rosenbach claimed was “the last great Shakespeare collection in private hands.”⁴⁷ Now people wanted to know who would get the rest of White’s treasures. First, the White family donated to Princeton—which had awarded White an honorary L.D in 1926—the collector’s First Folio, valued at $75,000. Second, the family wanted to announce a major gift to White’s alma mater, Harvard, at commencement in June. They asked Rosenbach to make a selection; he chose eighty-eight Shakespeare quartos valued at $420,000.

Harvard was willing to buy more gems from White’s library. The college set up a fund to purchase “on most liberal terms” three hundred volumes from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries handpicked by Rosenbach.⁴⁸ The book dealer soon reported to Folger that Harvard was having difficulty raising money for the purchase and returned several books to the White estate. The doctor wrote, “Surprising to state, [Harvard] retained some of the volumes which it would be possible to replace and returned others that could probably never be secured again.”⁴⁹

Folger’s turn came next, and he was ready for a bibliophilic binge. Between February and October 1928, he put together six different want lists of rarities from the White library that cost him $292,800.⁵⁰ Folger began his spree by spending $122,500—close to his entire annual salary—for twenty books from the White collection.⁵¹ In his invoice, Rosenbach highlighted the rarity of Folger’s new treasures by indicating the number of existing copies of each volume (see table 4).

The majority of the books Folger chose were from the Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland (STC), a listing of books published in English between 1475 and 1640. Once such rarities had left private hands for institutional shelves and public availability, they were out of the market forever. Thus did Henry Folger ensure the importance of his collection, and ultimately of the Folger Library in Washington and beyond. He was playing a part in assuring America’s arrival on the international cultural stage.

TABLE 4
Titles of Volumes from White Collection and Known Copies

Volume	Known copies
The ant and the nightingale (1604)	“Only one other copy known”
Armin, Fools upon foole (1605)	“Only one other copy known”
Armin, Nest of Ninnies (1608)	“Only one other copy known”
Austin, Scourge of Venus (1613)	“Only copy known”
Barnfield, Affectionate shephard (1594)	“Only one other copy known”
Barnfield, Enconium of Lady Pecunia (1598)	“Two others known”
Breton, Poete with a Packet of Mad Letters (1620)	“Only copy known”
Gordon, Famous History of Penardo and Leissa (1615)	“Only one other copy known”
Great Assises Holden in Parnassus (1645)	“Two others known”
Greene, Menaphon (1599)	“Two others known”
Greene, Grotsworth of Witte (1592)	“Only one other copy known”
Jones, First books of songes or Ayres (1600)	“Only one other copy known”
Look to it London (1648)	“Only one other copy known”
Marlowe, Hero and Leander (1598)	“Only copy known”
Nicholson, Acolastus his afterwit (1600)	“Only a few copies known
Ravenscroft, Deuteromelia (1609)	“Two others known”
Sait Marie Magdalen’s conversion IHS (1603)	“Only one other copy known”
Cupid’s Cabinet Unlock’t (n.d.)	“Only copy known”
Sharpe, More Fooles yet (1610)	“Only one other copy known”
True Declaration of the Estate of Virginia (1610)	“Five others known”

Source: FSL FC B1, Rosenbach invoice, February 3, 1928

Henry Folger’s bibliophilia was not limited to literary works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As he perused thousands of auction catalogs, his gaze wandered to other book categories. His want lists and bid lists are peppered with titles he acquired that cannot be found in the library on Capitol Hill. He offered these volumes to a coterie of friends, and occasionally they stayed in the Folgers’ home library.

By far the largest collection–1,400 volumes—consisted of books on butterflies. Every Christmas, and on other occasions over thirty years, Folger gave selections to his oldest, closest friends, Charlie and Mary Pratt. Each December 25, Mary would write a letter of thanks to Emily, with Charlie sending a second note of gratitude to Henry. After Vassar, Mary taught Latin and Greek, but lepidoptera were her hobby. Henry’s carefully chosen butterfly books for Mary included Thomas Moffett’s Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum (1634). The next oldest item was Muscarum scarabeorum (1646) by Wenceslaus Hollar. Half-hidden in the back of this book, a handwritten note from Henry survives on the back of his business card, revealing his ever-analytical mind: “1646 strikes us as an early date for butterfly engravings—Sept. 30, 1906.”52

Once, Folger returned a butterfly book in a pitiful state to Quaritch’s in London due to what some would consider a minor flaw. As he explained: “You sent me recently a very nice lot of books on butterflies … I have these books rebound and use them for presents. When I sent to the binder Wright’s Butterflies of the West Coast of the United States, 1906, he found, on checking it up for binding, that it lacked a signature, pp. 241 to 255, but in its place had a duplicate signature. This they did not discover until after they had torn off the binding. I am returning the volume for such disposition as you think can be made of it, and for such credit as you think is fair, as of course, I cannot use it in a scientific library.”53

Discovered after his death were stacks of butterfly books Henry had set aside for future gifts. As Mary noted in 1931, Henry “even took the time and trouble to assemble and arrange groups of pamphlets and had them bound for us—surely a labor of love for one whose mind and hands were so full of matters of enduring importance that an interest in mere butterflies might well have been as transcient [sic] as the lives of the subject.”⁵⁴

Another non-Shakespearean interest was golf. Folger bought his first set of left-handed hickory clubs in 1902 and won a handicap tournament at the Nassau Country Club in Glen Cove, Long Island, the following year. He subscribed to Golf Illustrated and the American Golfer. In 1926, he won a seniors’ competition on the couple’s annual visit to the Homestead in Hot Springs.

The golf books he purchased, including the Art of Golf and a scrapbook of Warwickshire golf, he forwarded to Charlie’s younger, more athletic brother, Herbert L. Pratt, also a Standard Oil executive. “Bert” had won the men’s golf championship at Nassau. Six months after Henry died, his successor as chairman of the board of Standard Oil of New York, Herbert, wrote Emily, “Very many thanks [for the golf books]. I never look at one of my grand golf library but I am reminded again and again of my loss of my ‘senior partner.’ How I wish he were here today to help me on one or two pretty knotty problems.”⁵⁵

Henry Folger’s top bureau drawer at home was the repository for dimes John D. Rockefeller had given him during their golf games together, generally Mondays at 10 a.m. One of Emily’s nephews looked back on the dime collection: “It was crazy to me, Rockefeller’s way of rewarding someone who did something extraordinary. Every time Uncle Henry would make a 16-foot putt or something, Mr. Rockefeller would reach into his pocket and hand him a bright shiny dime. How ironic, the richest man in the world giving out dimes for presents. It’s a piece of American folklore.”⁵⁶ Emily had a few of those dimes—all dated 1920—set in a silver watchband.

The Folgers’ pastor also benefited from Henry’s literary largesse. Continuing their churchgoing tradition, Henry and Emily rented a pew in the Central Congregational Church on Hancock Street in Brooklyn. Their minister, Samuel Parkes Cadman, was born in Shakespeare country, Warwickshire. The Cadmans and the Folgers became very close, carrying on a regular correspondence. Every year Henry gave his minister antiquarian books: editions of Shakespeare, old Bibles, even a 1616 book used by Luther to vindicate his attitude toward reform. Henry paid a shorthand reporter to take down Cadman’s sermons, presenting them to the minister as a bound volume. When Cadman published a book on preaching, Folger purchased 150 copies of “Ambassadors of God,” sending them to the pastor’s family and others in the United Kingdom and America.

Emily Folger used the dimes Rockefeller gave her husband after good golf shots to make a watchband. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Henry’s affinity for music drew him closer to the church. In honor of his late father, Henry paid for a harp stop for the church organ. He added his rich baritone to church service singing and gave financial support to the music program. He donated old musical scores to the church organist, in one instance selecting a volume of old French songs and suggesting that the musician “find somewhere in it a musical phrase upon which to build an Offertory or an Anthem.”57 Reverend Cadman gave the eulogies at the memorial services for both Henry and Emily.

Finally, Amherst College profited from Folger’s generosity. From a New York bookseller he purchased fragments of an imperfect Gutenberg Bible. The college librarian noted that the “leaf is in exceptionally beautiful condition and has three chapter initials, as well as the very rare head watermark.” Folger’s purpose was to provide for Amherst students a “sample of this bible in the original form, a very suitable item for reference.” To the college’s president, George Olds, in 1926, Folger sent William Robertson’s History of America (1777) in two volumes, carrying the bookplate and crest of Lord Amherst. Folger remained in close contact with the chairman of the English department at Amherst, frequently sending large crates of duplicate Shakespeare volumes to fill the shelves in the English seminar room of the college library.

Henry Folger intended to write a book about acquiring his Shakespeare collection. The excitement of the chase postponed the project again and again. Relishing his acquisition stories, however, prompted Henry to start writing, curiously, in the third person. Or perhaps the distant third person was not so curious, given Folger’s inborn modesty and shrewd secretiveness. Among his papers is a rare account, first in pencil, then typewritten, that reveals Henry the raconteur:

In one of Sir Sidney Lee’s articles tracing extant copies of the Shakespeare First Folio, a footnote states that Dr. John Gott, Bishop of Truro, has also a fine collection of the Quartos. That was enough to excite the curiosity of an avid American collector. A letter to the London firm through which he was then buying asked that a representative of the firm go at once to Truro, examine the Quartos, and, if possible, get an option for their purchase. The mail brought the reply that even a London bookdealer could not, without a letter of introduction, hope to see the books of a Bishop, and certainly not expect an interview with the great man himself.

This didn’t satisfy the eager American, and the request journeyed across the Atlantic to please send someone to sit on the Bishop‘s doorstep until he was admitted. In America such obstacles would be treated lightly, or be ignored. The reply to New York said the incident was closed, with no prospect of securing the treasures. An Englishman would have tried no further, for the present at least. But not so this ambitious American. “Do,” he wrote, “send someone at my expense, and devise some way to get the books.” Back the dealer went, with letters to the Bishop’s neighbors, and patient waiting was rewarded by a chat, not with the Bishop, but with his son-in-law, a local barrister.

Yes! The father-in-law had some Quartos, but they could not be bought. However, an opportunity to see them was at last granted. Beautiful books they were found to be, in fine condition, uniformly bound in crimson levant, several of them being most rare. And it was further developed, from the now interested barrister, that the Doctor was in poor health, with a very limited income, leaving nothing for repairing a considerable estate rapidly falling into decay. The son-in-law actually found himself sympathetic with the notion of disposing of the books to a keen American. There the negotiations stopped.

The cable was now brought into service, and persistent correspondence pursued. An offer for the books would be laid before the Bishop, and, if it was ample, would be urged for acceptance. A generous offer found its way to Truro, and, at length, the barrister appeared with the volumes at the shop of the London dealer. He was relieved of them in exchange for a check, for the American had urged prompt action should an opportunity offer. This was on a Friday afternoon, and the well-satisfied seller journeyed back into the country.

He was amazed to learn, on reaching home, that the venerable Bishop had, early Saturday morning, passed on to his reward. A few hours’ delay would have prevented the transfer of the books, and their acquisition would have become almost impossible. The obstacles of Chancery, and the delay and uncertainty of an auction sale to ascertain real values for tax purposes, would have loomed up. Had the mails, instead of cables, been used for the final negotiations, the shelf of lovely Shakespeare Quartos from the cloistered retreat of the sainted Bishop of Truro might never have found a final resting place in Washington, the United States Capitol.58

Henry Folger had shown promise as a writer at college, both in class and in correspondence with his parents, but his later correspondence consisted largely of short, business-like exchanges with book dealers. This rare anecdotal account of the chutzpah demonstrated by the “ambitious American” left Dr. Rosenbach and many others eager for more tales in the collector’s wry style. But soon, writing gave way to chasing down his ultimate prize, First Folios, another opportunity Folger grasped with determination. Continuing the “hunt,” he would follow wherever “the game [made] way.”