by Stuart Kells
The Folger Shakespeare Library
Eugene Scheifflin, one of the first Americans to collect Shakespeare, loved birds as much as he loved the bard. Scheifflin introduced European starlings to New York as one stage in his epic plan, to naturalise in the United States every bird mentioned in Shakespeare. He imported the starlings from England and released sixty of them in Central Park in 1890. A further forty took flight in 1891. Scheifflin hoped the birds would thrive and breed. They did. Today, there are almost as many European starlings in North America as there are people.
J. P. Morgan collected Shakespearean highlights in the face of strong competition from other bibliophiles and bardologists. Harry Elkins Widener was one of those competitors. In 1907 Widener bought, from a New York stockbroker via Abraham Rosenbach, a well-preserved copy of the First Folio. Five years later, Widener attended the Sotheby’s London auction of the library of Henry Huth, co-founder of the Bibliographical Society. There, Widener bought the second edition of Francis Bacon’s Essays. ‘I think I’ll take that little Bacon with me in my pocket,’ he said, ‘and if I am shipwrecked it will go down with me.’ A few days later, he and the book sank with the Titanic. Widener’s mother donated his First Folio to the Harvard Library.
During J. P. Morgan’s life, his fellow New Yorker Henry Clay Folger had been another competitor for bookish treasure. Folger possessed less money but more focus, especially in the market for First Folios. In fact, Folger was gripped by Foliomania of the most acute kind. Not that Folger lacked money: as an executive at Standard Oil, a firm that enjoyed a near monopoly on domestic fuels, he rubbed shoulders and played golf with the Rockefellers. (Folger invented a new type of golf putter, which he used like a croquet mallet.) Paradoxically, Folger benefited when the anti-trust authorities split Standard Oil into multiple businesses; at that moment, his annual income rose from about $50,000 to around $650,000. A large part of this income went toward Shakespeareana, and especially towards the acquisition of First Folios.
Though some prizes did get away, Henry Folger became the world’s greatest collector of Shakespeare. (One copy that escaped him was the famed ‘Bodleian Folio’. The Bodleian Library had sold that copy of the First Folio in the 1660s when the ‘better’ Third Folio came available—just as the unsentimental monks of St Gall had replaced their Vetus Latina with a ‘better’ Bible. In hindsight, the sale caused grave embarrassment. When the Bodleian Folio resurfaced, in poor condition and having fallen into the ownership of the Turbutt family of Derbyshire, the new masters of Oxford’s library were determined to get it back. A public appeal was launched. More than eighty subscribers pledged money and a total of £3000 was paid to return the book to its rightful place.) Apart from Shakespearean books, Folger also bought musical instruments and other artefacts of Elizabethan and Jacobean interest.
In August 1915 German submarine U-24 torpedoed the White Star Line’s RMS Arabic. In just nine minutes the ship sank, taking with it forty-four lives (390 were saved) and a cargo, en route to Folger, of twenty-five letters written by David Garrick. The following year, Standard Oil launched a tanker to transport fuel to Europe. The company called the ship SS H. C. Folger. Protected by naval escorts, it survived dozens of wartime voyages, mainly to British and French ports; in the ship’s worst brush with danger, a torpedo passed within fifty metres of the hull. Folger did not attend the ceremony to launch his namesake: he was ‘busy at his desk at 26 Broadway, filling out a loan application to borrow $20,000…to buy more Shakespeare’.
Henry Folger would eventually assemble a collection that was more than twice the size of Lord Spencer’s at Althorp. He bought so many books and paintings and artefacts that he forgot what he owned. When finally the collection was decanted and tallied up, the numbers involved were large: in excess of a million items of Shakespearean interest; more than 250,000 books; 60,000 manuscripts; 200 oil paintings; 50,000 other images, and a vast collection of theatre ephemera, sculptures, instruments and costumes.
Phobic, even paranoid, about publicity, Henry Clay Folger stored his books in bank vaults and lock-ups, and strove to keep his purchasing and his collection secret. This was, of course, impossible. Sidney Lee, president of the Shakespeare Society in England, was attempting an up-to-date census of the surviving copies of Shakespeare First Folios. Lee knew of many of Folger’s purchases, but the American’s voracity and secrecy drove Lee to distraction. For Lee, Folger’s conduct was almost as vexing as that of the Irish ‘Dragon’ who deliberately bought the books everyone else wanted, then hid them away. Inquiries about Folger’s holdings were continually rebuffed. A young Rhodes Scholar grumbled that, when researchers wrote to Mr Folger asking to see rare manuscripts, Folger would reply:
I am sorry that I cannot let you see the manuscript you refer to, for I bought it some time ago and with my other first editions and manuscripts I have wrapped it in brown paper and put it away in a vault. As I keep my brown paper parcels in twenty different banks and I do not remember which is in which, I cannot comply with your request.
Lee complained that Folger ‘seems to think First Folios ought to be put in a bin in cellars like fine vintages’. He bemoaned the Americans like Folger who were ‘stripping this country of rare early editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems—editions which had long been regarded as among its national heirlooms’.
Folger for his part was frustrated by Lee’s census busy-work, which tended to drive up values as owners learned what they possessed, and what their possessions might be worth. Late in life, Folger and his wife, Emily, made plans for a suitably grand building that would house their collection. They would fund the library with the fortune they held in Standard Oil shares. For the jobbing artist who painted likenesses of George V and Mussolini, Henry sat—holding a book—for a portrait that he would hang in the library. He had taken the subway to the artist’s studio, carrying the chosen volume wrapped not in brown paper but in newspaper. The volume was the so-called ‘False Folio’, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, a hundred times rarer than the First Folio. Henry had paid $100,000 for it, making it the most expensive book in the world. This is what Folger wrapped in newspaper and carried on the subway.
In Washington DC, Folger bought and demolished a row of brownstones on East Capitol Street, a block away from the Library of Congress. Throughout the planning of the new library, Folger consulted his more established neighbour. Americana and other English-language works were an obvious focus, but the Library of Congress also built early strengths in Slavic, Hispanic and Asian languages. George Herbert Putnam was an ‘epoch-making’ director at the library. His approach and methods influenced the management and operation of libraries in Scandinavia, the Holy See and elsewhere in Europe and North America. He and Henry Folger struck up a cordial relationship and agreed to maintain complementary footprints and collection scopes. Folger commissioned a building that, outwardly at least, harmonised with the other institution’s architectural style.
Just as Michelangelo had done at the Laurentian Library, Henry attended to every detail of his new building: the systems for heating, cooling and fire prevention; the uses of each room; the style of the furnishings; the placement of artworks; the height of the ceilings; the timber used for panelling; the musculature of the sculptures; the sumptuousness of the toilets; the recycling of bricks from the demolished brownstones. He specified that the sculpture in the ‘Elizabethan garden’ would feature Puck, ‘embowered in shrubbery’. He also placed great emphasis on fire prevention. Though ultimately he opted for real timber, he found and considered asbestos panels that had been used in home libraries ‘to simulate ancient oak’.
Most planning for the library was completed before the 1929 Wall Street Crash. With books stored at dozens of locations across the city, tracking them down and moving them into the library took six months and required a massive logistical effort. All this work had a splendid goal, but Henry never experienced the delight of unpacking his books and seeing them all together. Les
s than a year after the crash, the library not yet built, Henry died during what was supposed to be routine surgery. In the shadow of the stockmarket collapse, the value of his shares halved and the cost of the library doubled. Henry’s Shakespeare project was at risk of its own collapse.
Emily, though, vowed to continue the project as she and her husband had envisioned it. Construction was overseen by the man who supervised erection of the Flatiron skyscraper in New York and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington. The building was completed in 1932, just two years after the cornerstone had been laid. With an Art Deco exterior in white marble, the two-storey library looked as modern and streamlined as a Bakelite radio. And the contrast between the exterior and interior was even greater than that between the Morgan and the Frick. The interior was all dark wood and faux Elizabetheana. People entering the Folger Library were struck by the jarring, instantaneous transition from a high-modern aesthetic to an early-modern one. Henry and Emily had conceived of the interior as ‘the First Folio, illustrated’.
A deeply evocative place—ranking alongside the Winterthur Library as one of the world’s best examples of a specialist centre for historical and documentary research—the finished library is a remarkable monument to the Folgers, and especially to Henry’s Shakespeare mania. Washingtonians, and indeed all Americans, embraced the library as a premium stake in the Shakespeare story, and an emphatic representation—physical, political, teleological—of America’s claims over Shakespeare and his world. America was, after all, a Jacobean project—just like the First Folio.
Ceremonies to dedicate the Folger Library were held on 23 April 1932, the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and, according to tradition but not documentation, his birth. Present were Emily Folger, some of America’s most noted scholars and educators, President and Mrs Herbert Hoover, and a gathering of other distinguished statesmen, officials and ambassadors. According to press reports, the opening was the largest cultural gathering ever to be held in Washington. The event was broadcast nationally on radio. The main speaker, descended from Presidents John and John Quincy Adams, taught English literature at Cornell University. One of the most ardent Shakespeareans in the Americas, Professor Joseph Quincy Adams Junior announced that, with the new library, America’s capital now had three great memorials that stood out, ‘in size, dignity and beauty, conspicuous above the rest’: the memorials to Washington, Lincoln and Shakespeare.
Musicians from the American Society of Ancient Instruments played at the opening ceremony. The playlist included Thomas Morley’s ‘It was a Lover and his Lass’, transcribed from the Folger Library copy of Morley’s First Book of Ayres. The society performed on the library’s own treble viol, viola da gamba, virginal and clavichord. The ‘handsome new Folger Shakespeare Library’ was celebrated in the press as a noble shelter for ‘Shakespeare Treasures’. The Washington Post published a Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library Supplement. ‘The Folger Shakespeare Library,’ the supplement cooed, ‘is conceded by critics of architecture to be one of the noblest small buildings in the world. Of delicate and harmonious lines and of graceful proportions, the structure may be likened to a fine gem, skilfully cut and polished by a lapidary genius.’
Art critics declared the library ‘a true work of art’; a ‘temple to Shakespeare appropriate in all ways’; the newest and fairest diamond in the crown of beauty around Capitol Hill: ‘glistening white marble fashioned into a form of the utmost simplicity, set in a square of foliage and flowers, makes an appeal to the mind and heart.’ Thomas M. Cahill wrote appreciatively in the Post:
Word jewels of a master poet now repose in a casket, the excellence of which he may have dreamed but his day never saw. These gems, whose facets often were brightened in a rush-strewn tavern, now are guarded in a house finer than that of good Queen Bess, their fashioner’s most exalted patroness.
The builders and tradesmen on the project gloried in having reared the library. ‘They were like the old craftsmen of the Middle Ages. They loved their work, they were proud to do their best and they are proud of the result.’ (A construction worker who helped build Yale’s Beinecke Library expressed a different sentiment about that building, telling a reporter in 1963, ‘The whole thing’s built crooked’.)
Six years after Henry’s death, Emily passed away. She bequeathed what remained of her fortune to the library’s ongoing management. She also left behind instructions for the making of a special passageway in the library. It would have secret staircases and a cavity wherein would repose her and Henry’s ashes. The cavity would be covered by a brass plaque bearing the somewhat impious words, ‘FOR THE GLORY OF SHAKESPEARE AND THE GREATER GLORY OF GOD’. (Due to an unfortunate typographical error, almost as bad as the Wicked Bible, the inscription is rendered very impiously indeed in Henry Folger’s 2015 biography as, ‘FOR THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE GREATER GLORY OF SHAKESPEARE’.)
Henry had bought scores of First Folios. Today, the Folger Library stores them in the same way that the first codices were stored: lying down. On its face, this obsessive acquiring of multiple copies seems a decadent, even vulgar pursuit. But scholars comparing the folios have made striking discoveries. Textual changes occurred during the printing process. Differences between copies reveal much about the birth of the canonical texts, and about the editors and compositors who were the midwives to that birth.
Five distinct compositors emerge, each with his own style and character. The five are now identified by the letters A to E. Compositor A was a master of practical presswork, B was sloppy, E an accident-prone apprentice. Scholars have subjected the compositors to a plethora of typographical, grammato-logical and psychomechanical tests. There are many mysteries in Shakespearean bibliography, but what we know about his compositors provides a priceless patch of certainty. The Folger Folios demonstrate beautifully the fractal nature of bibliography. Every detail matters; every entry point is valid and rewarding.
On the subject of duplicates, the experiences of a Manchester library are salutary. Havana-born Enriqueta Augustina Rylands was the second wife of John Rylands, a prosperous Manchester cotton merchant. When her husband died in 1888 she inherited an estate of more than 2 million pounds. This she spent on philanthropic and cultural causes, among them the John Rylands Library in Manchester.
The core of the Rylands collection was formed through the purchase of one of the finest private libraries ever assembled: Bibliotheca Spenceriana, Lord Spencer’s splendid library at Althorp. As First Lord of the Admiralty from 1794 to 1801, Spencer had largely been responsible for giving Nelson the independent command in the Mediterranean that led to the victory of the Nile. Among his many book-world achievements, Spencer was founding president of the Roxburghe Club and a celebrated bidder at the Roxburghe sale. The library at Althorp filled five adjoining rooms: the Long Room, the Raphael Room, the Billiard Room, the Marlborough Room and the Poet Library. ‘A Shetland pony might be conveniently kept,’ Dibdin suggested, ‘to carry the more delicate visitor from one extremity to the other.’ Richer than many princes, Spencer collected tens of thousands of fine books and manuscripts dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. His library also contained 3000 incunabula, among them Caxtons, de Wordes, Gutenbergs and Schoeffers. Spencer had an eye for type.
Enriqueta negotiated the purchase in secret, ultimately paying £210,000 in 1892. Before then, no one had ever paid that much for a collection of books. The acquisition saved the Althorp Library from dispersal and brought a treasure to Manchester—a superb example from the golden era of English private libraries. The Rylands purchase included the Roxburghe Decameron, the most expensive book in the nineteenth century.
Apart from buying Spencer’s collection, Enriqueta paid for a suitable place to put it: a purpose-built, Gothic pile that became the elegant home of the John Rylands Library. She also acquired other major collections of printed and manuscript material, and gifted those, too, to the library. Upon her death in 1908 she bequeathed a further £200,000, as well as fur
ther private collections of books. The library spent the cash rapidly on acquisitions, rather than slowly on operations.
In 1972 the Rylands Library merged with the library of the University of Manchester. The following decade was a time of tight funding and government austerity. The managers of the merged libraries decided to sell ninety-eight ‘duplicates’ that were among the best books from the combined collection. Two thirds of the books slated for sale had come from Spencer’s library.
The sale took place a century after John Rylands’s death. Some books were damaged by rough handling in transit and at the pre-auction viewing. Despite spirited bidding by an Italian bookseller under the nom de vente ‘E. P. Benson’, the sale was a lacklustre affair. The books realised low prices.
Worse still, the library trustees realised too late that the books were not duplicates at all. The copies in the ninety-eight pairs differed meaningfully in illustration, annotation, composition, binding and provenance. One Spencer incunabulum in the sale featured unique author corrections; one had a unique leaf inserted; several had unique and important fifteenth-century provenance. After the disposal, visitors to Manchester could no longer make textual and typographical discoveries by reading differences between stellar copies of ninety-eight of the first printed books.
The sale caused an outcry. Though measured in different units, the cost to the library’s reputation was higher than the revenue raised. Manchester became a less significant place for the study of early typography such as fifteenth-century printing of Ancient Greek. As a book refuge, it had broken faith with the past. In the aftermath of the uproar, donors elected to send their money and their books elsewhere. The Earl of Crawford withdrew thousands of volumes that he and previous earls had deposited at Manchester. The books went instead to the National Library of Scotland.
Writing in the Independent, Nicolas Barker called the sale of the ninety-eight books an unparalleled ‘rape of the country’s literary heritage’. Writing further in The Book Collector, he said the sale had ‘destroyed the integrity of a great part of the bibliothecal wealth of this country’. The sale, he said, was like pillaging a trilith from Stonehenge.