The Millionaire and the Bard

by Andrea Mays

  It was a turning point. Folger decided that if he was about to get serious about Shakespeare, he must have an advisor. Henry was fast becoming an expert on the First Folio and other rare Shakespeariana, and soon he would become one of the most knowledgeable men in the world on those subjects, but he never pretended to be a great literary scholar. He began to correspond with Horace Howard Furness, a famous Shakespeare scholar in Pennsylvania and editor of the variorum editions of some of the plays. A variorum edition shows, alongside the main text of a play, all the various editorial decisions made by the major editors over time. Not only was Furness an expert who possessed an enormous research library, he was also the son of a great scholar. It was obvious to Furness that Folger was no dilettante, and he encouraged Henry and Emily in their study of Shakespeare and his plays. The correspondence blossomed into friendship, and Furness became a kind of mentor to the couple. Indeed, he outlined a course of study for Emily, eventually advising her on her master’s thesis. Emily was an intelligent, devoted Shakespearian in her own right. Furness advised her on the best method to study Shakespeare: total immersion. “Take . . . the First Folio,” Furness wrote, “and read a play every day consecutively. At the end of the thirty seven days you will be in a Shakespearean atmosphere that will astonish you.”10 In an era when it was unusual for a woman to earn a graduate degree or pursue literary scholarship, she became a student of how Shakespeare’s plays were published and edited over time. She examined the various editions, beginning with the texts of the quartos published during his lifetime, then the 1623 First Folio, and then the versions published by the various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors and adapters. In 1896, she received her master’s degree from Vassar. Her thesis, “The True Text of Shakespeare,” explored the question of how to determine the most accurate texts of the plays, as Shakespeare actually wrote them. Now Emily was a formally trained part of a team. According to a rare book dealer who knew the Folgers well, her “knowledge was always at the beck and call of her husband. She would hunt up bibliographical details and investigate difficult allusions, and frequently she would advise him to purchase a book or manuscript when he was wavering and undecided.”11

  Furness was pleased that the Folgers pursued their interest in Shakespeare together, as he and his wife had done. In 1897, Henry received a letter from Furness encouraging him to keep collecting at a fevered pace: “the sight of husband and wife, both eager in the same pursuit, always touches me deeply.” The academic, who could never afford a First Folio of his own, took vicarious pleasure and pride in the acquisitions of his protégés, whom he nicknamed “the kids.” Every year, on Good Friday, the Folgers visited the Furnesses to discuss and read Shakespeare, and to reveal their recent Shakespeariana acquisitions.

  In that same year, Folger had a chance to act on Furness’s advice. This time he did not wait to receive an auction catalogue in the mail, or a private offering from a dealer, to prompt him to pounce. This time Henry decided to try to buy something that wasn’t even for sale. A New York book dealer, hoping to secure a commission, tipped Folger off that a large and important English collection—whose owner he declined to name—might be sold. The dealer hinted that the hoard included four First Folios and twenty-two quartos. This was the kind of opportunity about which rapacious collectors dream—the death of an envied, fellow bibliophile who, during his lifetime, would never have parted with his books. Henry bypassed the American and engaged Alexander B. Railton from the London book dealer Sotheran’s. Find the collection, Folger instructed and, if it was worth having, secure it by private treaty before it went to auction. Railton did not disappoint. He discovered that the Fifth Earl of Warwick had inherited a magnificent library with the estates of his father, the Fourth Earl, George Guy Greville, who had died in 1893. The Fifth Earl was less interested in owning a pile of old books than he was in his sporting pursuits.12 There was more good news. The Earl had not yet committed to an auction sale. Folger pressed Railton to pursue the collection, holding out the promise of future business he would bring to Sotheran’s: “I will not write to any of the other London bookhouses until I hear from you.”

  Upon examination, the Warwick trove proved to consist largely of items that the Fourth Earl had bought from collector and bibliophile James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps’s 1854 catalogue of “Shakespeare Reliques.” Before purchasing the collection, Folger studied the catalogue, which he found “as fascinating as a novel, for the clever collector told how each item earned its place with the other gems and how he had tracked down his quarry with patience and skill.”13 It contained many treasures: seven copies of the Second, Third, or Fourth Folios; hundreds of other rare books, artworks, and manuscripts; and two priceless quartos, the 1599 Romeo and Juliet and the 1600 first quarto of The Merchant of Venice. Such quarto editions are more fragile and therefore more rare—imagine the fragility of a paperback or a comic book versus the durability of a hardcover book—and thus the scarcest quartos come to market less frequently than even First Folios. Ownership of this library would transform Folger overnight into an important collector, and the breadth of its holdings appealed to his growing appetite not just for First Folios, but for all Shakespeare rarities.

  Folger’s confidence in Sotheran’s was justified when, on April 3, 1897, the firm secured the Warwick collection for him at the lot price of £10,000, or about $50,000.14 While that success might seem the end of the matter, it was not. Time was of the essence. Folger wasn’t just eager to view his prizes; he was racing against an expensive ticking clock. On March 15, the U.S. Congress had begun to consider raising—nearly doubling—tariffs to 46.5 percent. If Folger could get his books into America before the increase, he would save in the neighborhood of $12,500 in import tax. Within three days of its purchase, the entire collection was packed in six crates, rushed aboard the SS Teutonic, and steaming its way to New York City. To Folger’s relief, his cargo arrived in plenty of time to avoid the tax. But he need not have worried; the tariff would not be increased until July, and furthermore, books more than twenty years old were exempt from the tariff altogether, a carve-out that would, over time, save him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  By 1897, Folger’s personal finances had improved over a couple of years earlier, when he had lost a collection he could neither afford to buy nor persuade Rockefeller to acquire. That failure had stung. His circumstances were different now. Now he could afford to purchase an entire collection, en bloc. In one transaction, with Sotheran’s assistance, Folger landed the Warwick Castle hoard. Its crown jewel was one of the half dozen or so known copies of the First Folio called “perfect” because it contained a complete, undamaged, and original title page with the Droeshout portrait, the facing leaf of dedicatory verses, the table of contents, and the last page in the book. It contained one hundred percent original leaves, including the preliminaries, though some of those were “supplied” from another genuine, but shorter, copy of the First Folio, and thus do not match the other pages in size (W 64, F 6). It is impossible to say what this volume had cost Folger. Because he had paid one lot price for the entire collection, his records did not attribute individual prices to each book. Given the high quality of this folio, Sotheran’s and Folger probably valued it at somewhere between $2,500 and $4,000. It was Henry’s third and finest copy. Now he owned more First Folios than anyone else in America. Most collectors would have been content to stop there, but Henry was just getting started. Amazingly, he managed to keep his purchase of the Warwick Castle collection secret from the public for the next twenty years, illustrative of a penchant for secrecy that would become one of his trademarks.

  By now the Folgers owned too many books, documents, and other objects to keep track of in their heads. They began to catalogue their collection. On hundreds, and then thousands, of five-by-eight-inch cards, Emily wrote, in her flowery hand, extensive bibliographic information: title, author, which dealer handled the transaction, and the date of purchase of each of the items acquired. Over time,
her handwriting disappeared, replaced by more efficient typewritten cards. As the cards increased in volume, the Folgers stored them in tall dressers called chiffoniers.

  By 1897, their collection had gotten too big to store at home. Once they had filled their bookshelves, and also their living quarters and basement, Henry and Emily rented a room at Eagle Warehouse & Storage, 28 to 44 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, at four dollars per month. They had their books and objets d’art hauled by the crate load to Eagle’s premises. Folger had the sturdy, wooden crates—originally meant to hold oilcans—made in a Standard Oil workshop. Every piece in the collection was handled directly by them. They examined, inventoried, and then packed away every book, manuscript, painting, and playbill for future use.

  In April 1898, Henry returned to Bang’s where, thirteen years earlier, he had bought that unremarkable Fourth Folio. Now he was back to bid on a First Folio. How different he now was from the unsophisticated, young clerk who could barely afford to pay one hundred dollars for a book. Now he was a successful executive at the most valuable business on earth, a knowledgeable bibliophile, and a passionate collector on the verge of unleashing the most unquenchable appetite for all things Shakespeare that the world had ever seen. The auctioneer hammered down the First Folio to Henry’s agent, the New York dealer George D. Smith, for $561. It was Folger’s fourth (W 102, F 44). It was a pedestrian example, with several defects. Multiple pages had been supplied from other copies. It was missing several preliminaries; others were touched up or replaced in full by hand-drawn facsimiles by John Harris, the most accomplished facsimilist of the nineteenth century. Harris had an unsurpassed talent for perfect pen-and-ink facsimiles, which he employed at the request of collectors unhappy with flaws in their old books and manuscripts. One assistant in the department of printed books at the British Museum noted that “some of the leaves that [Harris] has supplied are so perfectly done that, after a few years, he has himself [been] puzzled to distinguish his own work from the original, so perfect has the facsimile been, both in paper and typography.”15 But Henry had not been fooled. He was expert enough to recognize all of the volume’s faults, and wealthy enough to do better. It was the kind of cheap, second-rate copy that a new collector without the expertise or means to buy the best would acquire. He did not care. It was part of his plan.

  Henry and Emily continued to educate themselves about the worlds of bookselling and antiquarian books, becoming familiar with the phrases and euphemisms used in a bookseller’s or auctioneer’s catalogue. The specialized verbiage, like the language of any all-encompassing pursuit, was a private tongue, peppered with its own jargon, incomprehensible to an outsider. The Folgers became familiar with a multitude of languages, not of other nations, but of printers, binders, publishers, bibliographers, and cataloguers. In some cases, many words retained their common usage: new, clean, faded, frayed, stained, browned, broken, worn, polished, refurbished, rust-hole, alignment.

  In other cases, words that had a positive meaning in everyday life—like washed—were negative when applied to a book. Unwashed might be undesirable in a spouse, but it was a prized trait in a rare book. In a once popular process used to “improve” a book and make it more salable by removing unsightly page stains, and to make centuries-old paper look cleaner and brighter, dealers, auctioneers, or collectors would have a book disbound, the pages removed and separated and then washed by immersion in a solution of water and bleach. Then the pages were pressed flat, sewn back together, and rebound. The process may have brightened the paper, but when done too aggressively, washing could turn warm, age-toned pages unnaturally white. Washing also ruined the original, crisp feel of the Normandy rag paper, making it feel limp to the hand, soft and soggy. Pressing the pages flattened the original, three-dimensional impression of the type into the paper created by the letterpress. Henry and Emily learned how to detect washed pages with the touch of a hand, rolling the paper between the thumb and the index and middle fingers. They discovered the trick to identifying a pressed page: open the book, eyeball the page almost sideways in raking light, and look for the absence of tiny surface indentations of individual letters stamped into the paper by the pressure of the printing press. Washing reduced the desirability and value of a First Folio. The Folgers learned to prize most highly the copies with unwashed leaves that still possessed a slight golden tinge and the pristine, crisp texture they had when they left Jaggard’s shop almost three hundred years before. The presence of washed leaves was not, however, fatal. The treatment was not sufficient to deter advanced collectors, including the Folgers, from acquiring such copies, especially ones that were fine in other ways and complete.

  The Folgers also learned that the word unsophisticated had an entirely different meaning in the world of bibliophiles. To describe a book as an “unsophisticated” copy was high praise. It meant that the book was as close to its original state as possible: unmarred by the meddling of later binders who stripped books of their simple, original, and early seventeenth-century bindings in favor of later fancy, overelaborate, and inappropriate bindings; leaves unspoiled by washing; pages still the original size, with margins untrimmed by misguided collectors; minor tears and damage left undisturbed by restorers; and no pages missing. Henry and Emily learned that the majority of First Folios were missing at least a few pages. After almost three hundred years of reading, neglect, and abuse, two-thirds of the print run of 750 copies had perished, and most of the surviving copies had suffered some form of damage. Thus, when acquiring a First Folio, they had to leaf through each copy’s nine-hundred-plus pages to confirm that every single page was present, or which ones were missing. They also learned a shortcut for discovering whether the volume was complete. If a First Folio was “lacking” pages, to use the bibliographer’s term, the odds were that at least one of what collectors called the three “grand leaves” was missing.

  The most vulnerable—and thus most valuable—pages of any First Folio are the title page bearing Martin Droeshout’s engraved portrait of Shakespeare, the table of contents or catalogue from the preliminaries at the front of the book, and the last leaf of the play Cymbeline, which is the final leaf in the volume. Of the nine hundred pages in the book, those three were the ones most likely to be missing or badly damaged. Of the three, the most coveted was the title page with the portrait. The Folgers learned that it was not sufficient to confirm that these and all other pages were present—they had to be the right pages. To confirm this, the Folgers had to ask a series of questions about any First Folio that came their way: Are all the pages original to this particular volume, being the ones folded into quires at Jaggard’s shop in 1623, assembled there and sewn together, and then bound into the book? If not, have any missing pages been replaced by ones taken from another, authentic First Folio? If not, have any missing pages been substituted with pages removed from the Second or later Folios? A careful study of the paper and its different watermarks might reveal from how many different editions the monster had been created. And finally, are any replaced pages hand-drawn facsimiles? One artist became renowned for his brilliant, near-perfect, hand-lettered imitations of printed pages that often passed without detection. It was not easy to vet the authenticity of each page of a First Folio, and at their zenith, Henry and Emily were as skilled as the best dealers in the world in flyspecking and analyzing a copy of the book. Henry’s manuscript notes reveal that he was well aware of all the possibilities for chicanery and deception on the subject of replaced pages.

  A whole cottage industry grew up to supply missing pages to imperfect First Folios. Some dealers squirreled away hundreds of loose leaves, and used them to complete defective copies in their own stock, or to sell under the table to other dealers or collectors. Missing the first leaf from Henry V? Buy the sheet from a London book dealer’s basement stock of surplus First Folio leaves and replace it. When one American dealer advertised “First Folio leaves” for sale, Folger annotated the advertisement—“ask about Shakespeares.” Maybe he could buy them
all? In time, as printing technologies improved, mass-produced, machine-made facsimile pages replaced unique, hand-drawn copies. The coveted title page was especially subject to substitution as very few First Folios possessed their original Shakespeare portrait. One bookseller advertised facsimile printed pages for sale, with the pages most in demand actually listed in his catalogues. Book dealers touted badly damaged or seriously incomplete First Folios in their stock as ideal for harvesting pages to complete other, superior copies. A copy of the First Folio might even be entirely made up, a Frankenstein’s monster of parts assembled from the corpses of several other genuine but defective copies of the same book. A group of folios ruined beyond redemption could be dismembered and the best leaves salvaged and combined to make up one complete copy.

  The Folgers complemented each other. Beginning in the mid-1890s, Emily read thousands of booksellers’ catalogues, marking them with dog-eared corners and making pencil squiggles in the margins next to the items she recommended that Henry consider buying. Henry worked “zealously” late into the night going over catalogues and sorting through her notes. One famous bookseller observed, “The physical work alone was enormous as Mr. Folger had correspondents everywhere. He was known to every bookseller and collector throughout the world, all of them rendering enthusiastic assistance.”16 As a result, he developed a list of items he wished to acquire, and calculated bids for what he hoped to buy at auction. He took meticulous notes on condition, completeness, binding, provenance, and prices paid (and by whom), saving thousands of catalogues over the nearly four decades to come so that he might refer to them whenever a similar item came up at auction or private sale again. Emily wrote the catalogue cards that documented their acquisitions, keeping meticulous track of what they owned. She cross-referenced the cards with items offered for sale in the catalogues, either to prevent the accidental purchase of duplicate copies, or, after comparing the condition of a volume in their collection with one new to the market, to upgrade their copy with a superior one. Of course, the hoarder in Henry could usually not bear to part with the supplanted copy. To him, two copies were always better than one. And no two copies were ever exactly the same. Each copy was different, possessing its own unique physical characteristics and personality. Henry kept up active correspondence with dealers and others who wrote to him about Shakespeare rarities, and he negotiated through the various dealer-agents he engaged to bid at the London auctions or to pursue private sales in England or Europe.