by Andrea Mays
The Folgers collected for themselves, for their private pleasure. They became regular vacationers at the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, spending several weeks there each spring between 1914 and 1929. He played golf while Emily took what a friend referred to as “the nasty waters,” but neither took a holiday from collecting.17 They traveled with their massive chests holding the handwritten cards on which Emily had catalogued the collection. These chiffoniers containing the precious cards were shipped to the Homestead during their stays. The Folgers’ personal files are filled with notes scribbled on scraps of paper bearing the Homestead letterhead: lists of books, catalogue prices, and records of auction bids. Even on vacation, they would scrutinize catalogues and review communications from dealers, because an opportunity might arise that was too good to pass up and might require prompt action. They might need instant access to information about what they already owned if they were to act quickly to obtain an item.
For two reasons, Henry chose not to attend the major auctions. The first was strategic. He sought to maintain his anonymity. He reasoned that if he could keep his name out of the papers, and swear the book dealers to secrecy, he would be able to buy books much more cheaply. He knew if word got out that a wealthy American was buying multiple copies of the First Folio, plus other choice Shakespeariana, opportunistic sellers would distort the market by raising prices across the board. Of course, several of the top rare book dealers discovered his identity as soon as he made an initial private purchase from each of them, but that could work to his advantage—some booksellers began offering him first choice before their catalogues went to print. And so, for the rest of his career, secrecy became one of his signature traits. Second, he failed to attend the most important auctions of rare books because, in that era, most of them took place in London, and his increasingly important job at Standard Oil did not permit him the luxury of taking several days to sail across the ocean just to spend a few hours at an auction. Furthermore, any money he did not spend on travel he could spend on more books. Folger deputized trusted agents to represent him at the auctions, and he stayed in close touch with them by letter and by cable. Henry often paid for his purchases through his Standard Oil account, so his personal checkbooks are poor guides for how much was spent. He paid each seller in British pounds, with currency conversions resulting in a memorandum of exchange as part of the paper trail. Customs duties changed over time, but often the items were exempted from charges because they were antiques. When books or artworks were shipped from abroad, they entered America duty-free because, in a colossal understatement, they were “over twenty years old.” If an old painting arrived in a new frame, only the frame was dutiable. The New York customs house was only a block away from Folger’s office at Twenty-Six Broadway, which made it easy for him to take possession of his treasures quickly.
It was a fortuitous time for Henry Folger to begin collecting First Folios. An alignment of historical, cultural, and economic forces had brought about a sea change in the transatlantic trade of art treasures and rare books. By the end of the nineteenth century, just as great waves of European immigrants landed on America’s shores, another great western migration, not of people, but of objects, flooded America. That tide swept across the sea paintings, furniture, tapestries, sculptures, arms and armor, jewelry, silver, religious art, and rare books and autographs from the Middle Ages to the Edwardian era. Centuries earlier, European explorers had sailed to the New World to carry away her riches—gold, furs, tobacco, cotton, and more—to their homelands. Now, in a reversal of fortune, the former colonies plundered the Continent. American money was flushing First Folios from their hiding places. In 1899, one of the premier London booksellers, Bernard Quaritch, a frequent dealer in First Folios, wrote to the bibliophile Sidney Lee saying, “perfect copies are usually sold by us dealers to American collectors.”18 The British did not put up much of a fight. If English millionaires don’t “bestir themselves,” Lee predicted, “there is a likelihood that all the . . . privately held copies of the volume still in [Great Britain] will make tracks across the Atlantic.”19 But, as the world’s expert on the provenance and history of the First Folio Anthony West later observed, “there was no bestirring.”20
Henry Folger’s good fortune in business coincided perfectly with these developments. No one knew it then, but the years 1895 to 1930 would be looked back upon with nostalgia as the golden age for collecting British literary treasures. Never before and never again would so many great English books, volumes of rare Shakespeariana, and First Folios come to market. And there was Henry Folger, present from the dawn to the dusk of that age.
Of the twenty-three First Folios known to have been sold in the 1890s, he had purchased four, one-sixth of the copies that came to market during the entire decade, and that was before he had matured into a serious collector. He had also purchased an entire library. In 1899, on the twentieth anniversary of his graduation from college, he reported to the historian of the Amherst Class of 1879 a summary of his achievements. Playing to type, he did not boast about his role at Standard Oil, or of his wealth, nor did he advertise his growing collection of Shakespeare treasures. He downplayed everything that he had accomplished in the previous twenty years as a businessman and collector:
My annals record little that is of even passing interest. A business position with the Standard Oil Co. has called for my best efforts to meet added responsibilities; while for diversion, the gathering of a modest library—for the most part as yet unread—had helped to keep me interested in matters literary.
As the nineteenth century came to a close, many historic changes were around the corner. The new era would become the century of the automobile. Henry was poised to rise with the coming of that new technology. Cars meant a new industry and an unprecedented demand for rubber and steel. And a new source of fuel: gasoline. Once a worthless by-product of the refinement of crude oil, gasoline was a godsend to the fortunes of Standard Oil. The product fueled not only cars, but also a modernization, mobility, and a new state of mind that changed the country and led to an era of prosperity and confidence that historians would call “the American Century.”
By New Year’s Eve 1899, Henry and Emily Folger had settled upon the habits and practices that they would use in the new century to develop their collection. They would avoid publicity; become experts in their own right and not rely exclusively upon dealers and auctioneers for information; document their purchases with meticulous catalogue cards; review sales and auction catalogues together and promptly; travel abroad to experience the milieu of Shakespeare’s England and meet the top dealers; inventory, crate, and store thousands of books, manuscripts, and artworks in warehouses so that their home would not become a bizarre warren for crazed packrats; and not limit themselves to the best First Folios—they would consider any copy if the price was right. They would buy all rare Shakespeariana and not limit themselves to First Folios; they would not attend the British auctions and bid in person, but they would engage trusted London dealers to represent them; when efficacious, they would make bulk purchases and acquire entire libraries; they would leverage their buying ability by using Henry’s Standard Oil resources; they would work together as a team (Emily has never received proper credit for her role, perhaps because Henry wrote the checks and handled the correspondence, but their acquisitions were the result of their collective judgment); they would not wait for coveted books to come up for sale, but they would track down their owners and entice them to sell; Henry and Emily would keep track of what was for sale, what had been sold, to whom, and at what prices, information that was gathered through correspondence with book dealers and auction houses as well as through subscriptions to multiple domestic and international clipping services, which sent articles gleaned from thousands of newspapers and periodicals; and, finally, the pair would live frugally—except when spending thousands on a single book. Perhaps the Folgers’ most important secret was that they were “hands-on,” refusing to delegate or o
utsource their passion, knowledge, or decision-making.
By the close of the nineteenth century, they possessed the will, expertise, and growing financial resources to dominate the world of Shakespeare in ways that no one had ever even imagined. The new century would bring Henry Folger word of a stupendous discovery that would transform his enthusiastic pursuit into all-out obsession.
Chapter 7
“The Most Precious Book in the World”
—HENRY CLAY FOLGER
HENRY WELCOMED the twentieth century with the acquisition, in 1900, of his fifth First Folio, paying $9,000 for an especially attractive copy (W 66, F 8). It was the highest sum he had paid for a book, double what he had paid for his second copy in 1896. It contained one hundred percent genuine First Folio leaves, though some were supplied from other copies. Although the preliminaries were included, some pages were “cropped, mounted and ruled in red.”1 Then, in April 1901, he paid $892.50 for his sixth copy (W 94, F 36). Like any inexpensive example, it was flawed. The book, bound in goatskin, had all of its preliminaries present, but the text leaves were taken from at least five other copies. By now, Henry had solidified one of his signature traits as a collector: he knew every First Folio was unique, each having slight differences from any other, so he was willing to buy inferior or incomplete copies for research and comparison purposes—if the price was right. By 1900, he had paid between $561 and $9,000 each for his copies, plus the $50,000 he had paid for the Warwick Castle library. It is quite clear that he had chosen to become a scholar-collector. No matter how damaged or incomplete the volume, each surviving page was precious to him.
From the outset, Folger possessed two distinguishing characteristics that gave him a comparative advantage over other collectors. First, he began early. Many American millionaires waited until their fortunes had reached extraordinary size, until late middle age or retirement, to pursue their passions. Folger started young, before he became wealthy or even knew that he would prosper.
Second, he was not a passive collector, reacting to fixed-price sale catalogues, private correspondence offering items, or public auction catalogues, as was the custom for a number of other famous book collectors. In the beginning, in particular, there were other collectors far wealthier than he, and dealers were more likely to offer them first choice. They could also outbid him at public auctions. And some of them lived in England. He had to find a way to get ahead of the other, more prestigious, more established, and more moneyed collectors in the queue. As Folger had done in the business world, he decided to go out and get what he wanted, including from owners who weren’t immediately willing to sell. The skills he honed during his early years at Standard Oil served him well. He could distill numbers into a nugget of a concept. He could gather information; detect a trend; find a way to do something more efficiently. Why, for example, wait for copies of the First Folio to come up for sale at auction when he could chase their owners down? This was also useful in cutting out the middlemen—often the auction houses and sometimes the dealers—to buy direct. In 1902, the publication of a remarkable book enhanced his opportunities to do just that.
When Henry Folger began collecting First Folios, no one had ever compiled a census of extant copies. In 1824, the celebrated bibliophile Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin had tried to locate and describe all of the known copies, but his pioneering effort yielded incomplete results, locating forty-five examples.2 Collectors operated in the dark, without knowing how many copies existed, and they were ignorant of the true rarity of fine, complete volumes.
At the turn of the twentieth century, another man, the English Shakespeare scholar Sir Sidney Lee, set out to collect all available information about the surviving copies. He sent typed, personalized letters to all known owners of First Folios, to suspected owners, and to book dealers and auction houses that might know the identities of owners, requesting that they complete the survey he enclosed with his letter.3 This ill-designed questionnaire asked each owner to reveal facts and opinions about his or her copy of the First Folio: its provenance, or ownership history; the size and binding; the presence or absence of the front matter or preliminaries; the number of pages, if any, missing from the text; its present location; and last, in a cheeky question that must have offended the privacy of a number of its recipients, the price that the owner had paid for the volume.
Lee located 156 First Folios.4 He divided them into three subjective, arbitrary categories based on the condition and completeness of the books. He classified the best copies as Class IA, those less perfect as IB, and the most defective as IC. Lee inspected few of the folios personally, leaving him at the mercy of their owners to describe accurately the condition of the books. Many, of course, overlooked significant flaws, while others embellished their treasures to inflate their value.5
The Lee Census, as it became known, was published in 1902 as a separate volume to accompany the Oxford facsimile, collotype edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, which carried the awkward title Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, being a Reproduction in Facsimile of the First Folio Edition 1623 from the Chatsworth copy in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire, K.G. with an Introduction and Census of Copies by Sidney Lee. It was the first complete attempt ever made to locate every single copy of a book. Even a century later, only four other books have been the subject of such a complete census: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species; James Audubon’s The Birds of America, a massive 26.5-by-39-inch volume of 435 color plates known as the Double-Elephant Folio; the Gutenberg Bible of 1455; and Copernicus’s 1543 De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), describing the heliocentric model of the universe.
When a copy of Lee’s Census landed on Henry Folger’s desk and he flipped through its pages for the first time, he must have been elated. Lee listed only one copy as belonging to Folger, when he already owned six.6 His secret remained safe. From the Census alone, no one could guess that he was accumulating First Folios. But now, thanks to Lee, Folger had an idea of the universe he was trolling and for the first time he possessed answers to important questions. How many copies of the First Folio had survived, and in what condition? How many were held by institutions (and presumably out of Folger’s reach), and how many were still in the hands of individuals, and ripe for the plucking? Though Lee’s motive was scholarly, he had inadvertently created a wish list for Folger.
Henry annotated his copy of the Census like a shopping list. First he checked off the copies he owned but which Lee had attributed to other collectors. Folger also wrote marginalia about other copies in his own tiny, neat hand. This was no amateur. Not only familiar with Shakespeare’s text itself, but also he had mastered the skills and language of bibliography, and he assessed the provenance, completeness, and condition of each copy inventoried in the Census. These notes, Henry hoped, would prove useful in the future whenever a copy listed in Lee came up for sale. Folger had to buy many books, including folios, sight unseen from English dealers and auction houses. Without a personal inspection, or accurate and expensive photography, he was at the mercy of descriptions written by book dealers and auctioneers—hardly disinterested parties. Sellers often concocted subjective and self-serving catalogue descriptions of rarity that wove together over-the-top phrases like “highly desirable,” “very rare,” and “exceptionally choice,” with optimistic and even delusional condition reports like “very minor restoration,” “only a few leaves supplied,” “very tall copy,” “original binding,” and “one of the finest extant.” Folger planned to use the descriptions in the Census to checkmate such hyperbole whenever copies included in it came up for sale. He would keep Lee’s checklist within reach for the rest of his life.
Sidney Lee’s Census was not without flaws. He had located just 156 First Folios, and, perhaps because he relied upon the owners’ subjective and often inexpert answers to his survey questions, Lee’s published descriptions of the condition of the First Folios included many errors. Lee had
failed to collate each copy, check it for missing or replacement leaves, note damage, measure the height and width of the pages, examine the binding, inspect for washing, or confirm the originality of the engraved portrait. Many owners, through ignorance or dishonesty, failed to report significant flaws. But soon Lee would try again, and he would not overlook Henry Folger.
Although the Lee Census had revealed a number of mouthwatering specimens, for Henry Folger the years 1900 to 1903 were marked, on the surface, by little collecting activity. If Folger was quiet, others were active. On December 13, 1902, the New York Times published a major article about a remarkable sale of Shakespeare quartos at top prices, including a 1611 Titus Andronicus with uncut leaves that sold to an American buyer for £620, a world-record price for any quarto edition of the plays. It was not even the first Titus quarto from 1596, a legendary rarity of which no copy has ever been found. The buyer was not Henry Folger.7 There were reasons for his temporary retreat from the market. First, he was still digesting the Warwick Castle library. Second, he was busy assuring his rise at Standard Oil. By the turn of the century, his responsibilities and income dwarfed what he had been doing and earning a decade earlier. He enjoyed more than a good salary. Now he had the ear and unquestioned trust of John D. Rockefeller. He was accumulating one of the most valuable commodities in the world: shares of Standard Oil stock. It was the value of that stock, more than anything else, that would fuel Henry’s future acquisitions.