CHAPTER SIX
Whole Volumes in Folio
The Ultimate Prize for Collectors
… I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise wit, write pen,
for I am for whole volumes in folio.
Love’s Labor’s Lost 1.2.183–85
SHAKESPEARE’S FIRST FOLIO (1623) is a large book with dense double-column pages printed in London seven years after Shakespeare’s death. One scholar has described its printing as not “consistent,” another as “careless.”1 The manuscripts for this volume have gone missing. Yet its pedigree is matchless. It became, early on, the ultimate prize for major collectors, and Henry Folger triumphed in assembling the greatest number of First Folios in the world.
The First Folio is important for many reasons. It is the first edition of the author’s collected plays, thereby establishing the core of the Shakespeare dramatic canon.2 It is the sole source for half of Shakespeare’s dramatic production. Eighteen plays (including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, and As You Like It) had never been printed before and would not have survived without this early compilation. The large size of the folio represents a statement about the importance of dramatic works in an age where the stage was not usually deemed an elevated art form. Shakespeare’s now iconic portrait, his steep forehead memorialized in the volume’s preliminary pages, is one of only three representations of Shakespeare widely accepted as authentic.3 Three subsequent editions followed: Folio 2 (1632), Folio 3 (1663–64), and Folio 4 (1685). Scholars assign textural preeminence to the 1623 folio because each of the others derives from the preceding editions and introduces its own corrections and errors.
The First Folio is not considered an extremely rare book. First Folio specialist Anthony James West has described in extraordinary detail 232 extant copies of the book out of an estimated 750 printed nearly four centuries ago.4 By comparison, fewer than fifty Gutenberg bibles survive. Today 147 copies of the First Folio exist in North America, 47 in the British Isles, and 26 in other parts of the world, notably Japan.
Two of Shakespeare’s friends, longtime fellow actors, and shareholders in the acting company first known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and then as the King’s Men—John Heminge and Henry Condell, neither of whom had any editorial experience as far as we know—took the initiative to gather Shakespeare’s plays in a single, comprehensive edition and prepare the First Folio for publication. The substantial risks of financing the venture were borne by five London publishers: William and Isaac Jaggard, Edward Blount, John Smethwick, and William Aspley. William Jaggard had become blind, and died during the course of production of the First Folio; his son Isaac took over the family printing business. Without the enterprise of these seven men, the work might not have appeared at all.
The First Folio was approximately a foot high, most copies measuring about nine by thirteen inches.5 With some exceptions, they were offered to the public unbound, with pages uncut. Due to the large-size format of the volume, and the quality of the handmade sheets of rag paper imported from northern France, the sales price was high—between fifteen shillings and a little over one pound (twenty shillings), or, as Paul Collins expresses it, the equivalent to buying forty loaves of bread.6 No evidence exists that William Shakespeare cared about leaving a written record of his plays. In his era, performance was publication. Drama was written to be recited by actors, not read by the public. An author would have derived little to no financial benefit from the printing of his works, for the theater—not the author—owned the plays. Appearance of plays in print was feared to discourage potential spectators from attending performances. Hundreds of dramatic works produced during Shakespeare’s time have thus disappeared, known only by their titles.7
The first First Folio Henry Folger acquired cost him a mere $1.25. Soon after his college graduation in 1879, Henry bought a reduced facsimile edition prepared by the British collector Halliwell-Phillipps.8 He had ample time to enjoy and scrutinize the volume before deciding to acquire a genuine First Folio in 1893, for an unrecorded price. We can only guess at the thirty-six-year-old Folger’s feelings as he leafed through the partially mutilated volume, a few pages in facsimile, others supplied from another copy. His purchase had all of the 454 original text leaves, with some remargined and restored. Folger probably did not know that some London booksellers owned and operated basement “facsimile factories,” where they stacked antique paper of First Folio vintage with crown watermarks, ready to use in repairing imperfect copies of the famous volume.9
In 1903, Folger bought no fewer than eight First Folios, for a total outlay of $56,275. One copy alone cost $48,730, the second highest amount he ever paid for the coveted volume. At this time, almost no one knew that Henry Folger had bought multiple copies of the First Folio. In early 1904, reporting on his doings for his twenty-fifth Amherst reunion, Henry gave a hint in his understated way. “I … have made a collection of material illustrating Shakespeare which I believe will soon be notable.”10 Henry called the First Folio “the greatest contribution ever made to the world’s secular literature… [and] the foundation volume of every notable library of English.”11 Emily later referred to the volume as “the cornerstone of the Shakespeare Library.”12
It’s one thing to consider the First Folio the most important book in the English language. It is another to yearn to accumulate multiple copies. Speaking of any other book, Folger claimed that he did not collect duplicates. Almost no one outside the Folger household had any idea how many volumes he had acquired and stashed away. In 1901, Shakespeare biographer Sidney Lee undertook to compile the first census of known First Folios. Indeed, it was the first census taken of any book. Over the following months, Lee sent the same questionnaire to Henry Folger three times, asking him to declare what he knew about the whereabouts of copies. Folger did not respond. Then Lee persuaded Folger’s friend George Plimpton and a Brooklyn acquaintance to intercede with Folger to extract a reply, but to no avail. When the census appeared in 1902, Lee tentatively attributed one copy to Folger, declaring J. Pierpont Morgan to be the private collector with the largest number of copies, three. In fact, Folger had acquired six by then.
Henry’s close friend Horace Howard Furness gleefully celebrated a milestone in 1911 by calling him “Forty-Folio Folger.” It was only in 1914, after Folger had packed away in vaults and warehouses seven more copies of the First Folio that he wrote to clarify the volume’s allure. “My collection, is, perhaps unnecessarily strong in First Folios—yet every one of the 47 copies seems to have an excuse for its presence.”13 He pointed to one copy that contained Shakespeare’s portrait in an extraordinarily brilliant proof state. He singled out another that had come to him by way of an en bloc collection purchase. Further, Henry said that certain copies were special because they had belonged to people close to Shakespeare, his editors. The collector had become fascinated by the history of ownership, or provenance. He was also fastidious about the condition of the copies he obtained. Seeing each of his copies as having a unique history and story, Folger did not consider them simply duplicates.
Besides, these early books differed typographically. Two twentieth-century men analyzed the First Folio from the viewpoint of its printing. The U.S. Navy had provided large research grants to Charlton Hinman to compare before-and-after aerial photography of military operations during World War II. In peacetime, the cryptanalyst turned to comparing by a strobe effect the same page from two books in minute detail, using a machine he had invented, the Hinman Collator, which works on each eye retina independently. After he had analyzed over fifty First Folios from the Folger collection using an electron microscope, he wrote two large volumes recounting his discoveries.14 At this early stage in the history of printing, when no standard spelling existed, Hinman deduced that at least five compositors set type for the First Folio. For example, one (compositor B) would write a Shakespeare line “Do you … ” while another compositor (A) would set the type as “Doe you … ” Hinman’s focus on individual pieces of type led to a new understanding of printing in Shakespeare’s day.
Scholar Peter Blayney later referred to inconsistencies and compositors’ errors, raising the probability that at least nine different men, including one teenage apprentice, set type for the volume.15 Some errors were made by intentional emendations, others by accident. Folger was aware of printing inconsistencies in the folios, and had set for himself the goal of performing his own collation once he came to the Shakespeare Library to study his collection. That day, sadly, never arrived.
Textual differences aside, Folger realized that many of his First Folios contained valuable annotations in the margins. Some altered the text; others indicated stage directions; still others revealed readers’ reactions over the centuries. Whenever a book was rebound, its pages were first trimmed, risking destroying part of the text line as well as marginalia. Folger favored unbound copies—despite that the overwhelming majority of his First Folios were bound by later owners—where more marginalia were intact. In preferring to preserve history and a volume’s integrity rather than to parade personalized binding, Folger was ahead of his time. Today the Folger librarians will purchase an antiquarian book containing marginalia where they already possess a copy without marginalia, and they keep them both.
Shakespeare scholar Jean-Christophe Mayer has examined the Folger’s First Folio collection in an original way. He has studied readers’ markings in the margins of the plays, analyzed their variety, and speculated on their meaning and importance. In Folger copy 45, an eighteenth-century reader elegantly inscribed the words “The incomparable Shakespear” across one of the flyleaves, and “Knowledge & Wisdom” underneath. The book’s owner felt empowered to record feelings of praise for the author. A reader wrote “W. M. died July 12, 1894” next to a speech in The Merchant of Venice. It is a line one might be more apt to read in a family bible than on a leaf of Shakespeare. Folger copy 78 displays several juvenile ink drawings near a signature, “Elizabeth Okell her Book 1729.” The drawings depict a house, seen from the inside and outside. They may have reflected the book owner’s imagination of her familiar world. Mayer writes that “books are part of social networks and the social value of the book increases its symbolic and intellectual value.” He refers to the markings as “life-writing” in which book owners and readers relate Shakespeare’s plays to their own lives.16
Amherst College honored Folger with a Doctor of Letters degree shortly after his purchase of a forty-ninth First Folio in April 1914. After the ceremonies, Folger was driven to a banquet with a recipient of the Doctor of Laws degree, William Howard Taft. The ex-president leaned over to Folger and joked, “Forty-nine folios? We have the fiftieth at Yale.”17 Folger knew that a Yale graduate had bought a First Folio and presented it to Yale’s Elizabethan Club in 1911. Although the topic was comical to Taft, tracking the location of all First Folios was deadly serious to Folger. His copy of the Sidney Lee census is marked up by notes of auctions held, prices paid, and owners identified. Folger described the condition in which he found each copy and was careful to note if he had personally examined the volume.
In 1915, Folger purchased no new copy. Appearing to take a breather, instead he was taking stock. He admitted to the London bookseller A. H. Mayhew, “I need one more First Folio to bring my collection where I wish it.”18 He gave the initial impression that he would stop collecting First Folios once he reached the number fifty. But what he then proposed to Mayhew was an extraordinary scheme. From the Lee census, Folger knew the identities of as many as thirty-five private owners of First Folio in England. Folger petitioned Mayhew to write to each one, asking whether he would part with his copy, and, if so, at what price. Folger stood to gain several new copies by this aggressive maneuver. Not one owner accepted his invitation, and some replies were hostile. Over time, however, by persisting, Folger managed to acquire several First Folios from the recalcitrant collectors. As for the country parson who responded on a postcard, “Sir I have no intention of selling my First Folio Shakespeare. It is something to have one,” his copy is now missing.19 Being open to Folger’s overture would have guaranteed the volume’s survival.
The year 1923 was a big one for Henry Folger: he was elected as the first board chair of Standard Oil of New York. One day that year, Folger placed before him all his notes regarding the characteristics of his First Folios and started to assign each volume a distinct number. He did not choose to order his acquisitions chronologically. For instance, his first purchase in 1893 received the code Folger copy 55. Folger’s numbering system remains somewhat enigmatic, but it seems based on a combination of factors: the provenance of ownership, condition, and the presence of unique traits that would add to the copy’s value (such as marginal notations or the quality of the Shakespeare portrait).
A few transactions for Folger’s First Folios consisted not of a single purchase but an entire collection. Folger copy 6 came from the library of the Earl of Warwick. Eight boxes of books from Warwick Castle Library arrived in New York in 1897 after Folger secretly acquired the collection for £10,000 ($48,000 at the time). In telegrams to his British agent Henry Sotheran, Folger used the code name “Golfer.” Folger realized that he could not make the en bloc purchase of the Warwick copy with his own funds. He turned to the Pratt family, as he had in the past, and received a conditional agreement from Charlie Pratt: “Tell Folger he may have the money provided he will agree to invite me to his house to dinner for a private lecture on the collection.”20
Folger ascribed the place of honor as Folger copy I to the Vincent copy, not because it was the first one he obtained or the one for which he paid most. He referred to it as “the most precious book in the world” for other reasons. He bought it in 1903, from the London bookseller Henry Sotheran, Booksellers to the King, for the record price of $48,700. Although the volume is not complete, it was one of the very first to be struck off. The portrait of Shakespeare with the high brow on the title-page is unusually brilliant. The copy lay totally uncut and in its original binding.21 Collectors favor large copies; this one is the largest in the world. Folger esteemed this folio as unsurpassed for another reason. It was one of two copies presented by the printer, Isaac Jaggard, on behalf of his father William Jaggard—the original printer of the First Folio—to Augustine Vincent the Herald, who wrote a Latin inscription dated 1623 at the top of the title page. Vincent’s armorial stamp on the original binding was incorporated into the present binding.22
Folger loved to recount the circumstances in which this dusty volume was found in rural England. Sotheran’s agent Alexander B. Railton had finished inspecting the library of Coningsby C. Sibthorp of Lincoln when he was taken to a coach house to weed out worthless items for a sales catalog. An assistant handed down several large books from atop a case, remarking to Railton about one of them that was bound tightly with cord, “That is no good, sir, it is only old poetry.”23 It was the Vincent First Folio. Railton stuck by Folger during the four years it took the collector to persuade the seller to part with it. The Folgers themselves boarded a steamship to London to carry the precious volume back to New York. In 1907, Henry published an article on it in the Outlook, illustrated with photos by his close friend, George D. Pratt. The Outlook was published by a Brooklyn friend of the Folgers, Lawrence F. Abbott, who enjoyed Standard Oil patronage. The magazine paid Folger twenty-five dollars, although the author had offered to forego any compensation. For a spell, Folger knew the disappointment of an author in search of a publisher: Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, the Century, and Scribner’s all rejected his manuscript.
A pair of First Folios—Folger copies 25 and 26—belonging to Lord Amherst of Hackney and auctioned by Quaritch in 1909 at Sotheby’s would almost certainly have interested Folger because of their link to his alma mater, Amherst College, whose name goes back to that of Lord Jeffrey Amherst, British commanding general in the French and Indian Wars. A Tyssen-Amherst bookplate appears in both volumes. Folger bought them for the modest price of $2,200 each. The copies contain facsimile leaves as well as leaves from another copy of the First Folio. Folger considered his two Lord Amherst copies complementary: one was imperfect at the beginning, the other at the end. However, he protested to Quaritch when he read in the auction catalog that the two copies formed one complete copy. Folger had examined them carefully and discovered that “neither one has an original fly-leaf.”24 Folger’s attempt to acquire the pair at a private sale before auction went awry, as Lord Amherst suddenly died, thus complicating any special arrangements with his heirs.
Title page of Shakespeare’s First Folio, published in 1623, with the familiar portrait of the playwright by Droeshout. The Folger Library possesses eighty-two copies of the First Folio, all different in some respect. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
In the spring of 1911, Folger informed a London bookseller that not only was he intent on obtaining complete First Folios but he would also be eager to secure “any parts” of a First Folio.25 When a bibliophile shifts from the whole to parts, he enters a new level of collecting. Collectors raise a fuss about fragments only with respect to the most highly prized literary items in the world. For example, single medieval illuminated manuscript leaves are popular. Leaves from the most significant antiquarian books bring good prices; in this category figure the Gutenberg Bible and Shakespeare’s First Folio. At the time Folger was widening his collecting objectives, he was also enduring a complicated, trying period in his business life. In the spring of 1911 he was prominent in representing Standard Oil facing an antitrust lawsuit in the Supreme Court (see chapter 3). Professional vicissitudes, however, did not derail his ferocious determination as a collector.
Folger was attracted to the Thomas Hanmer First Folio (Folger copy 16 bought for $6,650 in 1911 from the New York dealer John Anderson) because Hanmer was one of the earliest editors of Shakespeare’s Works in the eighteenth century (Hanmer’s edition was published in 1744).26 Buyer and seller were quite close. Anderson was prone to emphasize in his correspondence the extraordinary pains he had taken to obtain an item for Folger, adding that some details could be divulged only later, and orally. In this case, Anderson claimed he had run to a nearby drugstore to phone, presumably to avoid being overheard in the office. For his part, Folger flatly laid out to Anderson his terms for capturing the prey: “I consider $4500 a full price for it today. I do not wish to lose it even at 7500. But I feel that 6500 is all I should pay.”27 Anderson enabled Folger to obtain the item at a private sale even after it had been included in the auction catalog. Folger sealed the winning bid on December 14, ten days after his election as president of Standard Oil of New York.
Folger was delighted to obtain the Earl of Roden copy—Folger copy 2—pur-chased in 1912 for $13,750 from Frank T. Sabin in London, before the volume was offered in public sale. The feature that pleased Folger most was the copy’s proof-state portrait of the Bard. London book trade expert Peter Blayney explains that the first few copies of the First Folio displayed a portrait of Shakespeare in which his head appeared to float in space. Folger always sought completeness in his library, buying all manner of First Folio varieties, even if only for their unique illustration, without regard to text.
Although Folger (unlike his California rival Henry E. Huntington) affirmed that he never bought a book for its binding alone, he nevertheless admired the best binders’ skill. Roger Payne (1738–1797) inherited his father’s trade to become the greatest of British bookbinders. Payne was renowned for the bright red, straight-grained morocco leather and rich gold ornamental tooling of his bindings. In addition, he made an effort to match the tooling of the binding with the contents of the book. In the Beaufoy copy of the First Folio, the front cover and spine display Shakespeare’s coat of arms. In 1914 Folger purchased the Beaufoy copy—Folger copy 11—from Quaritch for $15,500.
Folger also learned that he was acquiring the only book Payne bound in which he had laid in his bill for services. His bill in about 1780 for cleaning and mending was one pound, five shillings, and nine pence—presenting a full week of labor. Payne was cognizant of his binding skills. He wrote in the bill, “Six Leaves Inlay’d in so exceeding neat Manner as not to be seen without being told of it.”28 He had taken six leaves from another copy of the First Folio to replace the damaged or missing leaves. The fee for the binding itself came to three pounds, eight shillings.
As the bidding correspondence in letters and cables with Quaritch reached a climax, the collector made a startling claim.
My dear sir, I find I need just one more copy of the First Folio to bring my collection up to the number I have been planning to secure. Just now I am being offered a notable copy, but I do not wish to decide to take it until I have made sure that I cannot purchase your Beaufoy copy. Will you accept for it 3150 pounds? This will be the highest price, with one exception, that I have paid for a First Folio, and after buying this, or some other copy, I will be out of the market. Yours very truly.29
Folger out of the market? Not for another sixteen years, and only upon his death. During the intervening years, he purchased thirty more copies of the First Folio.
A mere hint to Folger that an item was somehow connected to the Bard would stimulate the collector to pursue it. The Samuel Gilburne copy has that name signed next to the same printed name on the page of the First Folio preliminaries listing the twenty-six “Principall Actors” on Shakespeare’s plays, actors presumably known to the playwright, who was also an actor and company shareholder. The copy was listed for sale in a London catalog in 1919, with a claim that Gilburne had probably owned the volume. Contacting one of his steady agents, Gabriel Wells of New York, Folger learned that the copy had been sold to a Shakespeare collector from Buffalo. Folger chased it down and offered twice the sales price, to no avail. Finally, in 1920, Folger obtained the coveted Folger copy 12, exchanging it for another First Folio from his collection, now in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.
After he had accumulated fifty-nine copies, Folger admitted that he already had “several” copies and was “looking only for such first folios as occur having very special interest.”30 Such an opportunity arose in just a few months. A First Folio belonging to the richest heiress in England, Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, had retained all its original 454 leaves in excellent condition, undamaged and unmarked. The volume went on sale at Sotheby’s in May 1922 and fell to Folger. From Rosen-bach, he bought Folger copy 5 for $52,070, a figure that established a new sales price record for a First Folio lasting a decade. The Folger purchase came only a few months after a buying coup by Huntington, who acquired the best-known English portrait in the world, The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough, for $728,000. A week after Folger’s purchase, the British satirical magazine, Punch, published a cartoon of Uncle Sam carrying off a folio under his right arm and a Gainsborough portrait under his left.31 As the British press lamented national treasures crossing the Atlantic for good, Uncle Sam is shown looking down enviously on Shakespeare’s tomb, dismayed that the Bard’s skeleton does not appear to be for sale. It was clear to the Brits that these two wealthy men represented a newly muscular American culture determined to include British gems in the new institutions they were planning to build one day.
A 1922 Punch cartoon by Bernard Partridge portraying Uncle Sam, embodying American collectors Henry Folger and Henry Huntington, carrying away a First Folio and Gains-borough’s Blue Boy from the United Kingdom to America. Reproduced with permission of Punch Ltd., www.punch.co.uk
Folger demonstrated in 1923 that he could pass up a fragment from the First Folio. He wrote to Maggs, “Replying to your inquiry of Sept. 3, about the play of Julius Caesar taken from a First Folio; I am, of course, interested in this, as I am in any plays from the First Folio, but could not consider paying anything like the price [£63] you name for it; so I will not trouble you to send it over for examination.”32
His acquisition of the Earl of Kimberley copy—Folger copy 68, purchased in 1924 for $37,000 from Quaritch Bookshop, London—is significant because it shows how Folger came to understand a little-appreciated aspect of the First Folio, the paper stock. Quaritch’s E. H. Dring speculated in a letter to Folger that paper thickness could vary from one folio to another, differentiating one stock of mill paper from another. The bookseller pointed to watermarks evident on certain leaves in this copy, noting that some were upside down. Furthermore, he suggested that a bookbinder’s washing with chloride of lime prior to rebinding could spoil a leaf. Admitting he had not previously paid attention to paper thickness, Folger appreciated all such bookseller suggestions about how to exploit his growing collection. Replying to Dring, he shared his intention “at some day in the near future, to compare my Shakespeare First Folios for any points of difference.” Such comparisons were greatly facilitated by assembling so many copies in a single location.
For eighty years, the Folger Shakespeare Library touted the seventy-nine First Folios Henry Folger had collected as the single most striking feature of the library’s collection. In 2011, the number suddenly grew to eighty-two, without any new acquisitions. How did this happen? What constitutes a folio, as opposed to a fragment of a folio, is subject to debate since some of the groups of fragments contain more leaves than are found in some of the copies included in the original estimate of seventy-nine Folger First Folios. First Folio experts Peter Blayney and Anthony James West and Shakespeare editor Paul Werstine for several years now have claimed that the Folger possessed eighty-two folios.33 During a 2011 Folger exhibit on the First Folio, the library officially recognized the three additional folios in the new count.
The distinguishing feature of Folger copy 80 arises from the purchase by bookseller Maggs Bros. in June 1926 of an incomplete folio already separated play by play. In a letter five months later, Folger offered £1300 for the lot. Maggs apologized that by the time Folger’s bid arrived, they had already sold two of the plays. They gave Folger the equivalent for the remaining broken-up folio at £1215. Folger’s copy now contained only thirty-one of the original thirty-six plays.
The collector bought Folger copy 81 from Gabriel Wells in 1923. The volume similarly consisted of thirty-one plays, bound separately. However, what set this incomplete copy above others was the richness of its marginalia. The Comedy of Errors and As You Like It included marginal notes on the play’s sources. The copy of Macbeth included notes attributing authorship of certain scenes to Thomas Middleton, not Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing gives the date when the play was presented at court. These annotations represent the added value Folger loved to acquire and show why he zealously hunted down imperfect copies of the First Folio.
Wells also sold him Folger copy 82, containing twenty-one plays.34 Particularly attractive in this copy were the annotations and autograph interlineations apparently made by actors on two plays. The Folger Library also houses a stack of more minor fragments the collector purchased, none of which has been elevated to the status of a Folger First Folio copy.
Once Folger proposed parting with a First Folio in an ingenious horse trade. An eighty-eight-year-old Harvard professor, George H. Palmer, had decided to donate his Shakespeare collection to Wellesley College in memory of his wife, but he lacked the ace of spades. Folger hoped he could upgrade one of his own copies by persuading Rosenbach to participate in a three-way deal: “It has occurred to me that perhaps there is a way you can meet the call upon you by Prof. Palmer for a Shakespeare First Folio. If you will make some sacrifice in the price of your very fine copy, and will take from me in part payment, a folio good enough to sell to Prof. Palmer, allowing on the cost to me of your copy what he pays for the copy you sell him, we will both (that is, Prof. Palmer and myself) benefit from the transaction. If you are willing to do this, I will hunt up the one I could spare, in exchange, good enough for the purpose.”35 Rosenbach refused the trade, writing back to Folger that giving up his First Folio would be “like performing Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.”
Today, an author’s collected plays seems a reasonable, ordinary volume to assemble and publish. Shakespeare’s First Folio, however, was the first ever single-author drama collection in the English language. While Ben Jonson’s folio of “Workes” preceded Shakespeare’s collected plays, Jonson’s was not limited to drama but also included his poetry, court masques, and prose. Critical study of the First Folio has established its own precedents as well. For the first time in history, a census has been developed to trace every copy of a single book. Anthony James West has completed three volumes on the history of Shakespeare’s First Folio, with plans for more to come. A multivolume set devoted to a single book is also a first.
A measure of the importance given the First Folio is the space devoted to it in auction catalogs. Early listings gave only the book title and place and year of publication. By contrast, before auctioning off the First Folio from Dr. John Williams’s library for £2,808,000 in 2006, Sotheby’s produced a sixty-page catalog devoted to that single copy.
In 1876, America could boast eighteen First Folios. A half-century later, Folger had singlehandedly quadrupled that number. Folger’s achievement is unique in the history of book collecting, in terms of both the rate and quantity of acquisition. By the end of the nineteenth century, the First Folio had attained prestige status and fetched lofty prices. In England, inheritance taxes had become prohibitive, and many collectors felt obliged to part with the gems in their libraries. Across the Atlantic, more and more rich Americans had disposable money for building collections. A significant migration of First Folios from Britain to the United States accelerated. At the same time, the volumes shifted from private hands to public ownership, making them unattainable for individual collectors.
Henry and Emily Folger gave only one interview. During summer holiday in 1924, they welcomed Brooklyn Eagle journalist William V. Hester Jr. to their rented home in Glen Cove, Long Island. When the discussion turned to the First Folio, Emily wanted the journalist to know that in honor of the tercentenary of the volume’s registration, a British Shakespeare scholar had suggested that all the copies in the United Kingdom—estimated at forty-three held in public or private hands—be given to the British Museum. Hester pondered this information. What Emily concealed, and what no one in Britain or America realized, was that at the time, the Folgers had already quietly squirreled away in storage warehouses sixty-seven copies of the First Folio.
Henry turned the subject of the interview to the purposes of the Shakespeare library he was intending to build. He wanted “to give the generations yet to come a better working knowledge and understanding of William Shakespeare and the literary works of the Seventeenth Century.”36 Henry Folger was on the scene at the right time, with his fortune, fortitude, and determination to build a great American patrimony, allowing him to assemble the greatest collection of Shakespeare in the world. Emily Folger was his equal in spoofing the press.