by Andrea Mays
The next day, on January 14, an article in another London paper followed up The Standard: “THE SHAKESPEARE DISCOVERY. THE 1594 QUARTO. PROBABILITIES OF PURCHASE.” This story speculated that the discovery “will lead to careful search for further copies on the Continent, and stimulus given to inquiry by this discovery now it is hoped, have some valuable results.” The article lamented that England had been picked clean of her Shakespeare treasures, by Americans no doubt, and that Europe was a better hunting ground: “Great Britain has been so thoroughly investigated by book collectors of late years that the Continent is now the likeliest place to reward the quarto hunter.”
From the instant that Henry Folger read the New York Times story, he coveted the Titus quarto. Although he had focused on First Folios, as a careful Shakespeare student he was well aware of the importance and rarity of the various quartos. Quarto editions of some of the plays—including the first Quarto of Hamlet—existed in only one or two copies.2 Over the last 311 years, no copy of the 1594 Titus quarto had ever turned up. This would be, Folger reasoned, his first and probably only chance to acquire one. But he was at a disadvantage. Sweden was thousands of miles away. He had no contacts there. At this moment, he guessed, European book dealers were already converging on Scandinavia. The book might already have been sold. His only hope was the London dealer who had, two years earlier, performed a miracle for him—the purchase of Coningsby Sibthorp’s First Folio. If anyone could capture Titus Andronicus, it was Sotheran and Company.
Unbeknownst to Folger, Sotheran had already mustered its forces on his behalf. On January 14, Mr. Sotheran dispatched a letter to New York: “You will have doubtless ere this have heard in America of the find in Sweden of the First Quarto 1594, of Titus Andronicus. We enclose the cutting from the ‘Standard’ of yesterday which was the first public announcement.” Sotheran had cabled the librarian at Lund University, asking if the book was still in his care, and if Sotheran might send someone to inspect it, in the hope of possibly buying it. “We have had no answer up [to] this present mail-time,” he wrote Folger. The firm would stand by to rush a representative to Sweden. It was possible that another dealer had gotten there first, but Sotheran was not willing to concede defeat: “If, as we fear, the book is already in London you may trust us to lose no effort to obtain it; and we should not hesitate to go up to £3000 on your behalf. We beg to remain, Your faithful servants. H. Sotheran.” Sotheran did not know that one of his London competitors, Pearson and Co., had already made an offer of £500, which was declined, and had then made a second offer of £650.
On the same day, at 9:40 AM, Sotheran cabled Folger one sentence: “What utmost offer will you make for 1594 Titus wanting only ten words.” The book was in good condition, had suffered only minor damage, and had lost just ten words of the printed text. By “utmost offer,” Sotheran meant that he would have one chance to make his best, highest offer. There was no time for Henry to indulge in complicated negotiations of the sort that had nearly cost him the Vincent First Folio. Folger would have one chance.
Later, Henry recalled the day he made his offer for Titus. He was, in 1905, or so he claimed, “an enthusiast whose means did not match his interest.” That description, coming from the man who two years before had paid almost $50,000 for the Vincent Folio, the most expensive book in history up to that time, was an absurd understatement. But it confirms that Folger had not forgotten the frugal habits of his early, lean years. “It took [me] three hours of tramping over city streets to clarify a bewildered mind sufficiently to cable the answer, ‘Two Thousand Pounds.’ ”
Sotheran responded the same night to Henry’s offer: “Are doing our best for quarto letter follows.”
Folger also received messages from other dealers. “During the next week,” he reported, “another London dealer cabled he was about to offer me a superb Shakespeare gem, and a third dealer wrote he would soon submit the lost Titus of 1594.”3 Folger had no way of knowing whether they had beaten him to the volume.
After a few days of silence, Sotheran cabled Henry again at 11:12 AM on January 19: “Representative now in Sweden may need cash tomorrow when will cable doubtful two thousand enough.” The owner had quoted a price of £3,000 to £4,000, but the Sotheran man whittled that down to £2,000 by promising immediate cash payment. Rival dealers were not prepared to back up their offers with instant cash. The next day, Sotheran cabled the outcome to Folger: “Bought cable immediately two thousand pounds direct to account of Jos Kraftt Riksbanken Malmo Sweden money must be paid today.” Folger paid at once, transferring $9,762.25 to Brown Brothers of New York in exchange for their making the payment of £2,000. Sotheran congratulated Folger on his bargain: “There is no doubt it would have fetched a remarkable price . . . at auction.” Henry knew it was true. A few months later he was offered three times what he had paid, and at one point he wrote, “Ten times Two Thousand Pounds would not be too much to expect should the treasure be now put on the market.” If Sotheran had acted in its own interests, it could have purchased Titus on speculation for its own stock, and marked it up by a few thousand pounds before offering it to Folger, or another wealthy American. If pressed, Folger might have paid a fantastic sum, perhaps £5,000 or more, for the little book wrapped in soft gray paper covers. Instead Sotheran sent Folger an itemized bill for cable messages, telegrams, registered mail, and insurance fees for shipping the quarto to New York, plus traveling expenses to Sweden. This time Sotheran did not invite Folger to fix the sales commission: the firm billed him £150—7.5 percent—for its services.
Sotheran warned Folger that there would be publicity over the sale because Swedish sources had been talking to the press. And indeed, on January 27, a headline in The Globe broke the bad news to the people of England: “A SHAKESPEARE TREASURE FOR AMERICA.” The British press lamented the loss of the unique first printing of Shakespeare’s first play: “The copy of the first edition of ‘Titus Andronicus,’ 1594, recently discovered in Sweden, has been purchased by Messrs. H.C. Sotheran and Co. . . . and is now, unfortunately, on its way to America.” The next day The Standard attempted to verify “the statement that . . . ‘Titus Andronicus’ . . . was now on its way to America.” A newsman, the story revealed, had “communicated with . . . Sotheran . . . but could obtain no information as to the ultimate destination of the volume, the reply being—‘We are not at liberty to give any further information on the subject whatever.’ ” To conceal Folger’s identity, a spokesman for the firm lied to the press and claimed that the book had been bought for “stock.”
The Titus episode taught Henry that not all publicity was bad—it could sometimes lead to good things. It was a newspaper article about Henry’s recent and well-publicized purchase of the so-called Shakespeare Bible that caught the eye of a postal clerk in Sweden, and that prompted him to take a second look at an old English pamphlet in his possession. Maybe, the Swede speculated, it was worth something.
Today, looking back more than a century, Henry Folger’s acquisition of the sole surviving quarto of Titus Andronicus, the first of Shakespeare’s plays ever printed, stands as one of the greatest triumphs in his collecting career, and possibly as the greatest bargain he ever enjoyed. It was the first—and to this day the last—copy ever found. Henry described his coup as a “delightfully romantic literary rescue.” And he waxed about his treasure:
It proved to be a veritable nugget. It is in immaculate condition, clean, perfect, and in the original bluish-gray, soft paper covers, just as such plays were offered to the playgoers at the theaters for a few pence. How it ever reached Sweden will probably never be known, but its migration to America might never have occurred had there been a delay of even a few hours in the race to secure it.4
If Titus were to come on the market now, it might fetch several million dollars—as much as a fine First Folio of thirty-six plays. The Titus triumph alone would have made Henry’s year, but he did not allow 1905 to pass without acquiring any First Folios. In March, he paid $1,350 for his twe
nty-second First Folio (W 89, F31), purchased from Sotheran, and then $7,250 (W 77, F 19) in November for another.5 The latter copy had been given the name “the Tweedmouth Copy” after two of its former owners, the First Lord Tweedmouth, who had been a brewer, director of the East India Company, and a Member of Parliament, and his son, who had been a Member of Parliament and First Lord of the Admiralty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This same year also brought one of Folger’s greatest controversies when, in a spectacular public struggle, all of England seemed to rise against him in an attempt to thwart his buying one of the nation’s most cherished and historic First Folios. No other episode in Henry’s collecting life better illustrates the Anglo-American cultural war over England’s literary treasures. The controversy began when one Gladwyn Turbutt brought a copy of the First Folio to Oxford to show it to Falconer Madan, sublibrarian at the Bodleian Library. The binding had suffered unusual damage, and Turbutt might have wanted advice on repairing or rebinding the book. Gladwyn’s father, Gladwyn M. R. Turbutt of Ogston Hall, Derbyshire, had discovered the volume in his family’s library no later than 1902, where it had languished for 150 years. The senior Turbutt had reported its existence to Sidney Lee two weeks after the bibliographer had published his Census of 1902. Lee added the information to his files, but nothing about this particular copy seemed especially interesting.6
At the Bodleian, Oxford’s expert on bindings, Strickland Gibson, examined the Turbutt Folio. The binding aroused his curiosity. It was very old, probably dating to the early 1620s, and thus appeared to be original to the book. That alone qualified this First Folio as rare and important. Gibson observed the odd damage to the cover—a long time ago the fore edge of the top board had been marred by a deep, unsightly gouge, as though something once attached to the cover had been ripped off. Gibson concluded that an iron clasp or staple had once been mounted there, and that the staple had been secured to a chain. In the 1600s it was common for libraries, including the Bodleian, to chain a volume to a bookcase to prevent theft. Such a chain was long enough to permit the reader to place the book on a shelf below and to read it while sitting on a fixed bench. It took Gibson only a few minutes to recognize certain idiosyncrasies in the binding—the techniques used to craft it, the color of the calfskin, the type of waste paper used to line the inside of the boards and spine—that identified it as the work of the master seventeenth-century Oxford bookbinder William Wildgoose. It was as obvious as if Wildgoose had stamped his own name on the cover. There was one more thing—in the 1620s, Wildgoose had bound a number of books for the Bodleian. Indeed, as Gibson examined Turbutt’s folio, identical Wildgoose bindings sat on the Bodleian’s shelves. The evidence pointed to one conclusion. The Turbutt First Folio had once been the property of the Bodleian Library. And if that were true, the book must be stolen property.
But had the library ever owned a First Folio? If so, how did it land in the hands of the Turbutt family? Falconer Madan dug into ancient records and discovered a handwritten entry in the Bodleian Binder’s Book of 1624 proving that William Wildgoose had bound and returned to the library a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Madan also consulted the printed 1635 appendix to the Bodleian catalogue, which confirmed the presence of a First Folio in the collection. It was obvious how this folio had arrived in Oxford. In 1602, Sir Thomas Bodley founded the library that bears his name. By 1610, he had arranged for the London Stationers’ Company to deposit with the library one copy of each book printed by its members, much like copyright law requires publishers to deposit copies of all books published in America. He declined to add plays to his shelves, describing them in 1612 as “idle books, and riff-raffs.”7 Sometime before his death in 1613, however, he must have relaxed that rule. In 1623, Jaggard sent one set of unbound sheets of the First Folio to the Bodleian. The library delivered them to Wildgoose, who bound them in 1624. According to Bodleian custom, the copy was then chained to a bookcase.
Falconer Madan discovered something else. A later Bodleian catalogue from 1674 did not include a First Folio, listing only the Third Folio of 1664. That evidence supported an inference that sometime between 1635 and 1674, a vandal had torn the First Folio from its iron chain and made off with the Bodleian deposit copy. If true, then the library might invoke the law to reclaim its long-lost, stolen property. But was theft the only plausible explanation for the folio’s disappearance? Madan dug deeper and excavated a fact that supported a different conclusion. The Turbutt First Folio had not been stolen from the Bodleian Library at all. Instead, the library had judged it worthless and sold it. In 1664, upon their receipt of a deposit copy of Shakespeare’s Third Folio, Bodleian curators branded their First Folio inferior and obsolete and sold it off in a group lot of other “superfluous” and unwanted books. Perhaps they reasoned that the Third Folio, which contained more plays, was superior to the First. The buyer, Richard Davis, bought the discarded copy for £24. Then the First Folio vanished from sight for almost two and a half centuries. Sometime in the 1700s, the book, its history long forgotten, came into the possession of the Turbutt family. Now, 241 years later, it had returned home.
A jubilant Falconer Madan brought the volume to the February 20, 1905, meeting of the Bibliographical Society, where it was publicly displayed for the first time since 1664. The years had taken their toll, and the folio showed signs of heavy use. Countless Oxford undergraduates had read the book in the forty years it had been chained to its case. Judging from the comparative damage to individual leaves, the most read and popular plays included Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Henry IV Part I, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. Suffering more wear and tear than any other work in the folio were the leaves of one play: Romeo and Juliet. And the most well-worn page of that play—indeed the most heavily damaged page in the entire folio—was the one facing the balcony scene in Act II, Scene ii. For decades, students enchanted by that romantic moment had rested their hands or elbows on the facing page and had actually rubbed through the paper. In condition, the Turbutt Folio was far from perfect. In romance, it was irresistible. Madan discussed his research, and proved to the satisfaction of all in attendance that this was indeed the missing Bodleian deposit copy of William Shakespeare’s First Folio. His announcement caused a sensation. Only the Augustine Vincent Folio boasted such an ancient provenance. Indeed, of all the other known copies of the First Folio, none but Vincent and Turbutt could be traced back to their original owners in 1623. Four days after the meeting, The Athenaeum published the news.
It was not wise of Falconer Madan to publicize his discovery. His excitement had trumped his prudence. He was desperate to obtain the book for the Bodleian. Chief librarian E. W. B. Nicholson wanted the book back and offered to purchase it, but the Turbutts were not inclined to sell, hoping to keep it as a family heirloom. Furthermore, the library did not possess the funds to purchase the folio, which consensus opinion seemed to value at about £1,000, or about $5,000. No one knew that two years earlier Henry Folger had paid ten times that for the Vincent Folio. Coningsby Sibthorp had kept his word, and had not disclosed the sale or the price. No one in England—save Sibthorp and Sotheran—could imagine how valuable a special First Folio could be, or how much Henry Folger might pay for one. Madan’s work had enhanced the value of the Turbutt Folio and had advertised the discovery all over the world, but he had failed to secure the book for the Bodleian. It would have been better to acquire the folio first, and only then publicize it. Madan would come to regret his naïve enthusiasm.
When news of the rediscovered Bodleian First Folio reached Folger, he decided that it would make a perfect mate to his precious Vincent Folio. Henry knew that if he could buy it, he would own the only two First Folios in the world that could be associated with their original owners. Folger suspected that the Bodleian must have already tied up rights to its former property. Still, it was worth inquiring.
Again, Folger turned to Sotheran, writing to declare his interest. Sotheran learned that the book was no long
er in Turbutt’s possession. It was still at Oxford. He had not sold it yet, but had left it at the Bodleian during meandering discussions about a possible sale to the library. In October 1905, perhaps reluctant to offend officials at the library, Sotheran called on Falconer Madan to assess the situation and gather intelligence about his intentions before making an offer on the book. To the firm’s surprise, the Bodleian did not seem “keen” to pursue the folio. So Sotheran contacted Turbutt, who allowed them to call upon him. In the meantime, the firm advised Folger to prepare to make a high bid, adding that they hoped to acquire the book for a price “as low as possible.” Henry cabled an offer of £3,000, close to $15,000, which Sotheran considered sufficient. Turbutt declined, but revealed that, although he had granted the Bodleian the first right of refusal on the folio, Sotheran’s impressive offer had given him second thoughts. On October 23, the firm cabled Folger that Turbutt would take one month to consider his offer. Sotheran believed—and advised Henry—that it would be difficult for the Bodleian to match his price. Folger agreed to wait until November 23, the day on which his agents had led him to believe he could quietly purchase the Turbutt Folio.
In mid-November, an article in the London Standard took Sotheran by surprise. The Bodleian had gone public. The story revealed that the library hoped to raise money to buy back its old folio, but editorialized that the cause seemed hopeless. On November 15, Sotheran mailed Folger a copy of the article. Near the end of the month, Turbutt informed Sotheran that he wanted to give the Bodleian more time to raise the funds, and declined to sell the folio on the agreed upon date of November 23: “I wish the Bodleian to become the possessor, or failing them, your client.” Henry was furious. He dashed off an angry cable to his agents: “Offer for folio made for immediate acceptance cannot extend time cancel if not accepted.” Henry, having second thoughts, followed with another cable on the same day: “Do not cancel if you think unwise.” But Sotheran had already threatened Turbutt, receiving no reply. Then, on December 1, Sotheran reported outrageous news to Folger. Turbutt had extended the November 23 deadline for four months and given the Bodleian until March 31, 1906, to raise the £3,000. “This is regrettable and is doubtless owing to Mr. Turbutt’s son being at present an undergraduate at Magdalen and mixing in literary circles at the University.” Then Sotheran gave what would turn out to be fateful advice: “We doubt if a higher offer at this stage would be advisable.”