The Millionaire and the Bard

by Andrea Mays

  The reappearance of one of Henry Folger’s self-declared foes also made 1906 an inauspicious year. Sidney Lee published an updated version of his First Folio Census. This revised edition located an additional fourteen newfound copies, increasing the total from 158 to 172 as of May 24, 1906. He also amended for accuracy some of the entries in his 1902 volume. Henry Folger had escaped Lee’s scrutiny in the late 1890s and early 1900s, but by 1906, Lee knew exactly who Henry was and must have grasped that he was collecting multiple copies of the First Folio. Indeed, Lee’s 1906 Notes and Additions to the Census of Copies of the Shakespeare First Folio outed both Marsden Perry and Henry Folger. “Mr. Perry and Mr. Folger, are now the keenest collectors of Shakespeareana in the world. Mr. Folger is to be congratulated on having acquired in the last few years as many as eight copies of the First Folio in all—a record number for any private collector.”2 Lee was only half right. No other person or institution in the world possessed so many. America was a magnet for rare Shakespeariana, which worried Lee. His 1906 census warned, “The American demand for First Folios, which has long been the dominant feature in their history, has shown during the last three years no sign of slackening. It will therefore surprise no one to learn that [the] thirteen English copies [remaining in private hands] are now reduced to eight. Five of them have crossed the ocean during the past three years.”3 After such wistfulness, Lee groped for positive news. Thus, he could not resist sniping that “it is perhaps a matter of congratulation that, despite the recent activity of American buyers, the most interesting of recently discovered copies still remain in this country.” Lee could have had only two copies in mind: the Bodleian and Sibthorp/Vincent copies. As far as Lee knew, Coningsby Sibthorp still stood watch over his copy at Canwick Hall. Indeed, crowed Lee, “only one of the ‘new’ copies which have lately found homes in America has any title to be considered of first-class rank.” When Henry Folger read Sidney Lee’s new census, the bibliographer’s ignorance must have amused him. “The most precious book in the world,” Augustine Vincent’s First Folio, had been Henry’s for three years.

  Lee scored the competition like a cricket match, noting that Great Britain led the game with 105 folios, compared to America’s sixty-two. But he detected an ominous trend. Between 1902 and 1906, eleven of Great Britain’s First Folios had “suffered” passage across the Atlantic to new homes in the United States. Lee called the game for the Americans and predicted Great Britain’s rout: “If the tide continue[s] running so strongly towards the West, the present ratio . . . will not be long maintained . . . of seventy-three copies which still remain in private hands on this side of the Atlantic . . . probably half . . . are destined during the next generation to adorn the shelves of private collectors in America.” Lee guessed that by 1915, Great Britain and America would own eighty-three First Folios each, followed by the inevitable shift to American superiority: “No diminution of the American demand during the next quarter century looks probable at the moment. The chances are that at the close of that epoch the existing ratio of American and British copies, sixty-two to one hundred and five, will be exactly reversed.” Time would prove Lee right. But in his wildest dreams, he could never have guessed that one man, almost single-handedly, would be responsible for the British reversal of fortune.

  Folger was not amused when he read Lee’s latest declaration of war against American collectors. It was that very sentiment that had deprived Henry of the Bodleian Folio he coveted. But Lee was oblivious to Folger’s injury, and to the consequences of his disparagement of American collectors. During Lee’s decades-long quest from 1900 through the 1920s to locate all surviving First Folios, he wrote to Henry several times, asking him to please reveal the number he owned and to complete census questionnaires for each one—he expected the American to help him. Folger, scoffing at the bibliographer’s impudence, ignored every request. Without access to Folger’s collection, Lee’s third attempt at an accurate census, published in 1926, was fatally flawed. He estimated that Henry owned twenty-five copies. By that time, he owned more than seventy. Sidney Lee went to his grave in March 1926 never having seen Folger’s collection, nor knowing how many copies it contained. At least three copies of Lee’s questionnaire—all blank—repose in the Folger archives, as does a copy of an evasive and noncommittal letter from Folger to Sidney Lee’s assistant, explaining why he had not yet replied.

  In the summer of 1906, during Henry and Emily Folger’s annual trip to England, they visited St. Paul’s Cathedral. Emily, playing tourist, was fascinated that “anybody can see the crypt with tombs of Wellington and Nelson . . . and the hole where coffins are let down.”4 It was not the last time she contemplated how the English honored their heroic dead.

  The year 1906 may have been one of Folger’s worst periods for collecting First Folios, but a key acquisition in another field of Shakespeariana redeemed the year. A footnote published in Lee’s revised census caught Folger’s eye.5 The Bishop of Truro, Dr. John Gott of Trenython, possessed a First Folio that he had inherited from his father, William Gott of Wyther Grange, Yorkshire. That was not the exciting news. In addition, Gott owned a choice collection of Shakespeare quartos as part of a magnificent library he had inherited from his family, wool traders from Leeds. “The bishop also tells me,” Lee revealed in his proud footnote, “that he possesses a large number of original . . . quartos, including ‘Hamlet,’ 1611; ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ 1598; ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ 1599; ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ 1600 (the two editions); ‘Merchant of Venice,’ 1600 (Roberts’ 4to); ‘Henry V,’ (3rd edition), 1608; ‘King Lear,’ 1608, with some other volumes hardly less valuable.”6 Sidney Lee should have known better. His footnote sent Henry Folger on the hunt.

  Folger asked Sotheran to send a representative to Truro at once to inspect the quartos. But, replied the dealer, they were not for sale. “This did not satisfy the eager American,” Sotheran recalled after the episode. So he requested the dealer “to please send someone to sit on the Bishop’s doorstep until he was admitted. In America such obstacles would be treated lightly, or ignored.” Sotheran cautioned that English gentlemen did not conduct business that way. Folger scoffed at the idea that the dealer could not, in the collector’s words, “without a letter of introduction, hope to see the books of a Bishop, and certainly not expect an interview with the great man himself.” Perhaps the quartos were not for sale because no one had ever thought to ask the bishop to sell them. Folger, perhaps recalling the success of his fevered pursuit of Coningsby Sibthorp and the failure of his restrained tactics when chasing the Bodleian Folio, persisted. He urged the dealer to concoct a way to discuss the matter with the bishop. “Do,” Folger wrote, “send someone at my expense, and devise some way to get the books.”7 Reluctant to approach Gott himself, the dealer broached the subject with the bishop’s son-in-law. With his help, Sotheran was able to persuade the divine to sell eighteen precious quartos, closing the deal the day before the bishop died. Had the negotiations taken one more day, the quartos would have become entangled in Gott’s estate, tied up in valuation, and not fallen into Folger’s hands promptly, if at all. The Bishop of Truro episode reminded Folger that in collecting, time was often of the essence. As it turned out, the Gott estate called upon Sotheran to sell the rest of the bishop’s collection.

  Later in 1907, the firm’s enormous, 120-page catalogue, Bibliotheca Pretiosa, described 595 items. Lot number 369, priced at £7,000, was a set of First, Second, Third, and two Fourth Folios “finely and uniformly bound in red morocco . . . by C. Lewis,” a renowned nineteenth-century London bookbinder. Sotheran also listed a group of Shakespeare quartos, with eighteen of them designated as “sold” before the catalogue was mailed. These were the very ones secured for Folger by private treaty before the bishop’s death. The preface to the catalogue mourned the diminishing availability of collections of such caliber, stating, “It is within the range of probability that the era will have come to an end.”8 The set of folios failed to sell, either thr
ough the catalogue, or in 1908 through the first of the Sotheby’s auctions at which the remaining items from the collection were dispersed. Bidding did not reach the £3,850 reserve. Folger did not like it when dealers tried to tie the sale of a First Folio to a so-called set that included the three later folios. Describing the four editions as a “set” was a misnomer—they had not been published together, and were never a set in the first place. It was just a dealer’s trick. Folger wanted Gott’s First Folio, but not the later editions. He had already bought a four-volume “set” in February 1906. This time he sat on his hands. He would encounter the book again.

  In 1907, during their annual trip to England, the Folgers went to Westminster Abbey, where they visited the tombs of famous actors and, no doubt, poets. Emily wrote in her diary: “Looked again and saw [Henry] Irving’s tablet—small and square—by [David] Garrick’s. His ashes are underneath.”9 Henry and Emily made a ritual pilgrimage to the final resting place of Shakespeare’s Queen: “Saw Queen Elizabeth’s tomb again,” Emily noted in her diary. “Dick says it’s worth dying to be buried in Westminster Abbey.”10

  That June, Henry paid $750 for an unremarkable First Folio, and in July, he paid $245 for another, remarkable only for its reprehensible state. It was one of the two least complete copies he would ever buy (W 90, F 32; W 124, F 66) with sixty percent of the leaves missing.

  Also in 1907, taking advantage of a worldwide financial panic that J. P. Morgan tried to stem in a famous conference convened in the library of his New York City mansion, Folger purchased treasures from the collection of one of his rivals, Marsden J. Perry, the Rhode Island millionaire. It would not be the last time Folger pillaged Perry’s collection.11

  Meanwhile, Folger’s career kept progressing. In June 1908, he was elected to the board of Standard Oil of New Jersey and appointed assistant treasurer. In this position, he prepared the company’s annual financial report. Later that year, he was elected to the executive committee, which met daily to discuss company successes, problems, and policy. Folger’s annual salary was now $50,000. In February 1909, he was elected a director of the Standard Oil Company of New York. That year, Henry began a two-year run during which he acquired a startling ten First Folios. In February 1909, be bought one for $3,500 (W 85, F 27). In March, he paid $2,200 each for a pair of copies that had belonged to Lord Jeffrey Amherst, namesake of his alma mater (W 83, F 25; W 84, F 26).

  By Henry’s first year as a director, the federal government’s antitrust action against Standard Oil had worked its way through the lower courts and climaxed in a three-day oral argument at the Supreme Court on March 14, 15, and 16, 1910. The very name of the case—Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States12—irked Folger. On March 30, he replied to an encouraging letter from his favorite sea captain, John Robinson: “We get many communications like yours, hoping for a satisfactory outcome of the contest with the U.S. Government.” Folger criticized the U.S. Court of Appeals for ruling against the company: “It seems to us that the decision of the lower Court, from which appeal is now being taken, was most unreasonable, not being at all sustained by the evidence and ignoring the position which the Standard attorneys took in its defense.” He briefed Robinson on the inner workings of the case, suggesting that the March oral argument had been a waste of time because, due to illness, one justice had been absent from the proceedings, and another had died suddenly less than two weeks later, leaving seven justices and not a full court of nine to decide Standard’s fate. Folger predicted that a shorthanded Supreme Court would not want to decide a case of this importance: “The Court undoubtedly had had no opportunity of studying the Standard’s case, and certainly had reached no conclusions. This leaves the situation quite complicated, and it is not at all unlikely that the Court may ask for re-argument, and have it take place when the nine judges have again been put upon the bench.”

  Despite a titanic and distracting legal battle taking place between the government and Standard Oil, Henry found time in 1910 to purchase seven First Folios—the most he had ever acquired in one year. He started small with a $450 copy in April (W 107, F 49), and then a $3,060 one in July (W 116, F 58). That month, he also acquired the well-known “Hargreaves” copy for $10,200 (W 71, F 13), which he considered a bargain given the figure at which it had been offered to him three years earlier. On May 31, 1907, the Abel Buckley copy had sold at Sotheby’s to London bookseller Bernard Quaritch for £2,400 ($12,000). In August 1907, on one of his trips to London, Folger examined the copy, noting the book was “sound and unwashed.” Quaritch priced it at £3,000 ($15,000), and Folger passed. Quaritch sold it to Colonel Hargreaves in October 1907 for £2,850. He did not keep it long. Sotheby’s auctioned “The Property of Colonel Hargreaves” on July 11, 1910, at which time Quaritch bought the copy back, this time for just £2,000. Folger purchased it from Quaritch that month for $10,200. By waiting three years, he had saved almost $5,000.

  Ten days later, on July 21, 1910, Folger bought the Bishop of Truro’s First Folio, removed from its set with the later folios, for $9,260 (W 67, F 9). Twice before, John Gott’s copy had failed to sell, first in 1907 in Sotheran’s catalogue and then in 1908 at Sotheby’s. Packaging it as part of a set had deterred buyers. The set of four folios was split up for individual sale and the Gott copy came to the Sotheby’s auction block again, this time by itself. Quaritch won it for £1,800 ($9,000), and passed it on to Folger the same month for $9,260. While concluding the sale to Folger, Quaritch told him “the Gott folio at £1800 . . . is not so fine as the Buckley-Hargreaves copy, which I think you got cheaply.”13

  Henry’s acquisition of the Hargreaves and Gott copies taught him the virtue of patience when pursuing some First Folios. It was not always necessary—or wise—to dash off in headlong pursuit of every decent copy that came his way. No other collector was buying multiple copies in bulk, and he could wait out the seller of an overpriced lesser copy with little fear of serious competition. But if a spectacular specimen in superb condition, or one possessing an alluring provenance, became available and attracted the attention of one of his rivals—J. P. Morgan, Marsden Perry, Alexander Smith Cochran, Joseph Widener, or Henry E. Huntington—Folger had to take immediate, decisive, and expensive action. Even then he possessed a competitive advantage—no other collector in the world knew to what lengths Folger would go to obtain a First Folio that he coveted. Yes, he was obsessed with all copies in degrees of mania. But his rational side managed to maintain control over his checkbook. When Folger abandoned himself to the thrall of a superior copy, however, as he had with the Vincent Folio, he was beyond control. He was fortunate that no other collectors, dealers, or auctioneers, none of whom believed that a First Folio could be worth more than $15,000, discovered that he had paid $50,000 for one.14

  Nineteen eleven was a landmark in the history of book collecting, the fortunes of Standard Oil, and the life of Henry Folger. The Supreme Court called for reargument in Standard’s ongoing antitrust case. The arguments, lasting four days that January, were an epic moment for Standard Oil, and the destiny of American capitalism.15

  In April, the world of rare books witnessed an epic event of its own. The great Hoe collection, one of the finest hoards of rare volumes ever assembled, went up for auction. It was the kind of ultra auction that bibliophiles feel lucky to see once in their careers. And the auction would take place not in London, traditional home of the most prestigious sales, but in New York City. It symbolized the shifting balance of power between English and American buyers. The April 24 auction attracted all the book-hunting luminaries of the day: Joseph Widener; Henry Widener; Beverly Chew; Belle da Costa Greene, the exotic personal librarian to J. Pierpont Morgan; the Maggs Brothers, the famous London dealers; George D. Smith, New York bookseller and Henry Huntington’s operative; and Henry Folger. This cast of stars would never gather together in one room again. Soon disaster, death, the specter of the First World War, and changing times would bring this magical era in the prewar Anglo-American bibliophil
ic scene to an end.

  At the Hoe sale, American buyers trounced their English cousins in the competition for the choicest lots. Indeed, noted the New York Times, “Few prizes went to London.” Folger collected a prize for himself, a First Folio for $14,300 (W 65, F 7). The high point of the auction was Henry Huntington’s purchase of a precious and most rare variant of the Gutenberg Bible, printed not on paper but vellum, for an astonishing sum. The New York Times of April 25 considered it worthy of a headline: “GUTENBERG BIBLE SOLD FOR 50,000.” Newspapers around the world touted that the California millionaire had just paid $50,000 for the iconic volume—the highest price in the world ever paid for a book, so the stories claimed. Henry Folger knew better.

  Three weeks later, on May 15, the Supreme Court made its own astonishing announcement. The nine justices, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., filed into the Old Senate Chamber in the U.S. Capitol and took their seats behind their big, rectangular wood bench. Speaking for the court, Chief Justice Edward White announced that the justices had reached a decision in the case of Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States. Then, for nearly an hour, he read aloud the court’s opinion.16

  Seven men and a corporate machine have seized unlawfully the second greatest mineral product of this country, and are converting it into mountainous private fortunes. For the sake of the Republic, we now declare that this dangerous conspiracy must be ended by November 15.17

  It was devastating.18 The court found that Standard Oil’s actions had been against the public interest, concluding that “the very genius for commercial development and organization . . . soon begat an intent and purpose to exclude others . . . from their right to trade.” As a remedy, the court did not impose a massive fine, nor did it order the company to change its practices. Instead, it meted out the most extreme punishment: the Supreme Court sentenced the Standard Oil Company to death. It ordered the company to dissolve within six months, an absurdly short deadline for the breakup of the largest business in history.