The Millionaire and the Bard

by Andrea Mays

  In 1914, Folger purchased two First Folios. That March, he directed Quaritch to buy one at the Sotheby’s auction of the A. B. Stewart library. Henry paid £1,263, including the usual five-percent commission, plus £3 for expenses (W 118, F 60). The same month, the New York Times trumpeted a triumph by Henry Huntington that must have pained Folger: “HUNTINGTON TAKES DEVONSHIRE BOOKS.”31 This magnificent library, one of the most famous and prized in England, contained four thousand volumes, including one of each of the four editions of the folio and fifty-seven quartos. For decades, envious collectors and dealers had considered the Duke’s collection unattainable. Indeed, in 1903, when Folger sent Sotheran a checklist of First Folios he hoped to acquire, the dealer told Henry to forget about it—the famous noble, rest assured, would never sell. Huntington paid an estimated $1 million to $1.2 million for the collection, causing the New York Times to speculate that the Californian’s Shakespeariana would “now rival Folger,” whose collection had “long been considered the best in the world.”

  In April 1914, Folger bought another folio for $15,500 (W 69, F 11). This copy, the Beaufoy copy, bound in 1780 by the prominent binder Roger Payne, contained an invoice from Payne detailing the work he completed to rehabilitate the volume, at a total cost of £4 13s 9d.32 That summer, Henry circulated word around Standard Oil that on August 11, he would receive an honorary doctorate from Amherst. It was to recognize his achievements in business. At the awards ceremony, Folger did not boast of his success or give advice on how to succeed in commerce. Instead, he touted his collection and advised the audience to study the Bard: “Collect Shakespeare, and you will soon find yourself in the very best company.” From Rockefeller’s home in Pocantico Hills, New York, came a letter addressed to Folger at Twenty-Six Broadway, dated July 25, 1914:

  Thank you for your letter . . . regarding the degree conferred upon you by Amherst College. I congratulate you upon receiving the degree, and that your connection with a great and useful business organization did not detract from your high standing. It begins to look as though it may not always be regarded as a crime in our country to be engaged in honorable business callings, even though the business is conducted upon a large scale.

  Three years later, the titan still smarted from the Supreme Court ruling against his company.

  In 1915, Folger, motivated perhaps by Huntington’s Duke of Devonshire coup, concocted a scheme to extract more First Folios from English private libraries. Conventional wisdom had been that Devonshire would never sell. American cash had shattered that conceit. If a man in such a high place as the Duke was willing to sell, then, Henry decided, any Englishman could be induced to sell. Folger, as he had done many times at Standard Oil, drew up a detailed battle plan. In this case, it was to acquire additional fine, or not so fine, copies. He had managed to keep secret that he already owned forty-nine copies of the First Folio when, in May 1915, he wrote to A. H. Mayhew, formerly of Sotheran’s, swearing him to secrecy, and requesting he make inquiries of thirty-five private owners of First Folios—whose identities had been exposed by the two Lee censuses—to determine whether they were willing to part with their copies. Folger still required a dealer to preserve his anonymity; as an American, and as an extremely wealthy man, his name might rankle British pride and drive up prices. Folger hoped to cut out the auction houses and other dealers, and minimize the competition he might face from other collectors if these copies became available on the open market.

  May 17, 1915

  Mr. A. H. Mayhew

  56 Charing Cross Road

  London, W.C.

  Dear Sir:

  I need one more First Folio to bring my collection where I wish it, and will be very glad if you can make some inquiries looking to securing another copy for me. If we cannot obtain a copy that is in pretty good condition, then I would be satisfied with two copies in poorer condition.

  I give below a list of owners of First Folios, most of which are in rather poor condition, and will you please write each one of these owners and ask whether his copy is for sale, and if so what value he puts on it. As they are all described in the Sidney Lee Census it is not necessary perhaps to ask them to describe the copy, although it might be well to try and get some general idea of the defects in each case. This, however, may keep many from answering, so I would not make it too emphatic. In other words, let them say whether their copy is for sale and give a price for it, then, if they are disposed to do so, add something about the condition of the copy.

  I of course will be glad to reimburse you for any expense you incur in this correspondence, or further inquiries you may think advisable, and would like to have for my files the answers you receive.

  Earl of Carysfort, Elton Hall, Peterborough

  Earl of Crawford, Haigh Hall, Lancashire

  Alfred Law, Esq., Honresfield, Littleborough

  William Phelps, Esq. Chestel, Dursley, Gloucestershire

  R. J. Walker, Esq., St Paul’s School, London

  The Marquis of Bath, Longleat, Wiltshire

  Francis Alexander Newdegate, Esq., Arbury, Nuneaton, Warwickshire

  John T. Adams, Esq., Snathfield, Ecclesall, Sheffield

  The Misses Williams Llandaff House, Pembroke Vale, Clifton, Bristol

  Sir Thomas Brooke, Bart. Armitage Bridge House, Huddersfield

  Mrs. Margaret Bulley Marston Hill, Fairford

  The Rev. Sir. Richard Fitzherbert Dent, Tissington Hall, Derbyshire

  W. C. Lacy, Esq. 52 North Side, Wandsworth Common SW

  Sir Edwin Durning Lawrence, Bart., M.P.

  Lord Leigh, Stoneleigh Abbey, Warwickshire.

  John Murray, Esq., 50 Albemarle St. London

  The Duke of Newcastle, Clumber House, Worksop.

  Mrs. J. W. Pease, Pendower, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

  Major General Frederick Edward Sotheby, Ecton, Northamptonshire

  Michael Tomkinson, Esq., Franche Hall, Kidderminster

  E. E. Harcourt Vernon, Esq., Grove Hall, Retford.

  The Rev. Fulford Adams, Little Faringdon Vicarage, Lechlade

  W. Hughes Hilton, Esq., Woodlands, Sale Cheshire

  The Marquis of Northampton, Castle Ashby, Northampton

  Alexander Pickover, Esq., L.L.D., Bank House, Wisbech

  Lord Zouche of Parham

  John Clause Danbury, Esq., Killian, Truro

  Lord Forester, Willey Park, Broseley, Shropshire

  T. E. Watson, Esq., Newpoet [sic], Monmouthshire

  Frederick Haines, Esq., Boreham House, Hampstead

  The Duke of Leeds, Hornby Castle, Yorkshire

  Panlin Martin, Esq., Clock House, Abington-on-Thames

  W. L. Martin, Esq., Ayton, Abernethy, N.B.

  R. H. Wood, Esq., Sidmouth, Devonshire

  Sir Everard Philip Digby Pauncefort Duncombe, Brickhill Manor, Bletchley

  It was a breathtaking, ambitious, and even audacious scheme. But audacity had conquered the Duke of Devonshire. Why, on smaller scale, could it not work for Folger? Three months later, Mayhew reported the results of the quest: complete failure. Not one soul had agreed to sell his or her First Folio. Not even the First World War, which had raged in Europe for the last year and drained Great Britain of men and treasure, could dislodge one. Henry, expressing his disappointment in a letter dated August 16, 1915, asked the dealer not to give up.33

  With each letter Mayhew had included a blank penny postcard on which the recipient could dash off a typed or handwritten reply. In the course of time, Mayhew received no encouraging answers, only negative responses, which he forwarded to Folger. Many of the returned postcards contained only three words, “Not for Sale.” That summer, a parson, the Reverend W. Fulford Adams, replied to Mayhew’s inquiry. He had inherited a First Folio from his aunt in 1890. On one side of the postcard was Adams’s return address, Weston-sub-Edge Rectory, Broadway, Worcestershire. On the reverse he had written, “Sir I have no intention of selling my First Folio Shakespeare.” The small-town vicar was not about to part with his tre
asure. The reply, like all the others, frustrated Folger. But Henry Folger would never dispute what the vicar wrote next. “It is something,” wrote Adams, “to have one.”34

  Chapter 10

  “The False Folio”

  THE “MAYHEW PLAN” had been an utter failure: It had resulted in no acquisitions. However, Folger was more successful the following year when in 1916 he purchased six First Folios: one for $870 (February, W 98, F 40), a pair for $3,000 each (in April and summer, W 120, F 62; W 97, F 39), one for $3,500 (W 121, F 63), another for $6,000 (March, W 119, F 61), and one for $6,050 (May, W 100, F 42). In 1916, a German submarine sank RMS Arabia, taking with it a precious cargo en route to Folger: twenty-five handwritten letters by David Garrick.1

  Nineteen sixteen should have been a landmark year for Folger. That April, Great Britain and America commemorated the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with books, articles, pamphlets, dealer catalogues, lectures, performances, and exhibitions. Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, by now a famous bibliophile and dealer and not publicity-shy, crammed the display windows of his Philadelphia bookshop with Shakespeariana. The tercentenary unleashed an unbridled celebration of the playwright and the Anglosphere that he had come to represent. For the British Empire, mired for the past two years in the trenches of the Western Front, and mourning tens of thousands of her slaughtered sons, the anniversary served as a reminder that the civilization that had produced William Shakespeare was worth defending.

  It was the perfect moment for Folger to come out from the shadows and claim his crown as the greatest Shakespeariana collector in the world. Instead, he observed the tercentenary by pretending that it wasn’t happening. He stayed in hiding, determined to preserve the anonymity he refused to admit he had forfeited years earlier. He might have considered the anniversary a nuisance that threatened to distort the rare book market by raising the demand and prices of Shakespeare rarities. So he declined to participate in any tercentenary events. Henry gave no public talks, wrote no articles, and displayed no treasures from the warehouses where his collection was stored. He could have displayed a selection of rarities in the lobby of Twenty-Six Broadway, locked behind protective plate-glass floor cases under the eyes of Standard Oil watchmen. Or he could have lent a few of the highlights from his collection to a major exhibition at a museum or library. He received one loan request from an institution in his own city, the New York Public Library. He said no. In 1916, Henry and Emily honored Shakespeare with but a single gesture—a cash donation to help finance the conversion of an existing garden in Central Park to one dedicated to plants mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. It was the same public space that the three Booth brothers had sought, more than fifty years earlier, in 1864, to mark with a Shakespeare sculpture. Emily, enamored with all the plants and flowers mentioned in the plays, preferred a living memorial.

  In the early twentieth century, Admiral Sir John Fisher tried to “Wake Up England!” to the threat of German naval expansion and superiority. During the war, he continued to urge First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill to convert the British naval fleet from coal to fuel oil, emphasizing the advantages conversion would bring: smaller crews, lower costs, increased maneuverability, and a greater radius of action because warships could be refueled at sea. Churchill agreed to the conversion. The refining industry no longer produced just a valuable consumer good. It was now essential in providing a reliable source of fuel oil for Allied shipping. Oil had become a strategic military commodity. In 1916, Standard Oil launched the tanker SS H. C. Folger to transport fuel to Europe. The sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania by a German U-boat in May 1915 helped propel the United States into the First World War. The mobilization of a large American army to sail across the Atlantic and fight a land war in Europe, using trucks, ambulances, tanks, airplanes, and other mechanized equipment, called upon the resources of Standard Oil of New York. The war effort added to Henry Folger’s responsibilities, and in 1917 he purchased no First Folios. By March 1918, American troops had begun to arrive in France in sufficient numbers for the Allied Powers to arrest the momentum of Germany’s last great offensive. By November, “the war to end all wars” was over. Historical events had not dissuaded Folger from collecting. The Panic of 1907 had not deterred him. The 1911 breakup of Standard Oil had resulted in a promotion for him and increased, not diminished, his wealth. Through 1914, Henry continued to purchase books in England, and indeed in 1916, the year of the Battle of the Somme, he purchased six First Folios. In 1918, he bought three more: a copy for $2,500 in April (W 99, F 41); one in June for $11,000 (W 80, F 22), one of the ten most expensive copies he ever purchased; and for $75 in November an incomplete set of loose leaves (W 123, F 65). The war had inconvenienced Folger in only a minor way: he had to pay for special insurance against the risk that steamships carrying his books from England to America might be sunk by German submarines.

  In 1919, the war was over but the combatant nations remained in turmoil. The punitive Treaty of Versailles stripped Germany of its pride, its monarch, its military power, its colonies, and its prewar borders, thus setting the stage for the meteoric political rise of an unknown German army corporal and a second world war more destructive than the first. The Russian Revolution degenerated into civil war, “the Great Influenza” spread around the world and killed millions, and German society collapsed amid economic depression, strikes, civil unrest, and nihilism. But for Henry Folger, positioned in New York City at a safe remove from Europe’s troubles, 1919 was one of his best years. He found no First Folios, but he was presented with the opportunity to acquire one of the greatest Shakespeare treasures of all time, one that rivaled in importance even the incomparable Vincent First Folio.

  Folger’s principal collecting rivals at the time were Marsden Perry and Henry Huntington. Neither one challenged Henry’s supremacy as king of First Folios or attempted to acquire more than a few choice copies of that book. But in the field of rare Shakespeare quartos and other important English books, they threatened Folger’s dominance. Huntington was newer to the game than Perry or Folger, but his appetite for quartos, combined with his almost unlimited financial resources, established him at once as a serious buyer. Soon he would spend on average one million dollars a year on rare books. By the time Huntington got into the game, Perry had already squirreled away some choice quartos.

  Marsden J. Perry, financier and utilities and interurban electric trolley transportation magnate, was known by the nickname “Utility King.”2 Beginning his collection in the 1870s, Perry aspired to build the finest Shakespeare library in America. In 1891, by the time Perry was forty-one, he possessed a collection of Shakespeariana sufficient to warrant a “Preliminary List” of one thousand titles.3

  In the late nineteenth century, Perry purchased a small Providence bank, and by 1894 had transformed it into the Union Trust Company of Providence. In 1897, he purchased the great Halliwell-Phillipps collection, which Folger had coveted, but could neither afford nor persuade John D. Rockefeller to buy. In 1901, when Perry built the Union Trust Company Building, he rerouted the trolley cars of his Union Street Railroad Company of Providence to the corner of Dorrance and Westminster, bringing “all of Rhode Island to the Union Trust’s doorsteps.”4 As Perry became wealthier, his collection grew, fueled by, in the words of one observer, “obsession, challenge and competition.” But the financial panic of 1907 hurt his interests, and he was forced to sell, through the offices of Sotheran and Co., the Halliwell-Phillipps copy of the First Folio. The buyer was Henry Folger. But Perry did not dispose of his best pieces, nor did he quit collecting. He viewed the events of 1907 as a temporary setback. For a number of years prior to 1919, Perry, like Folger and other collectors, had coveted the fifty-seven Shakespeare quartos owned by the Duke of Devonshire. They were Perry’s Holy Grail. But in 1914, Huntington had acquired them all when he bought a major portion of the Duke’s library. Crushed by this defeat, Perry announced that, without the Devonshire quartos, “My collection can ne
ver now achieve top rank and I think it time to sell it.” Perry brooded over the loss: “If I can’t have the Devonshires . . . I will give up collecting. I will not take second place.”5 What neither Perry nor Folger knew was that Huntington had a goal of his own in mind: the Devonshire quartos would make his collection of plays rival that of the British Library.

  In 1919, Perry’s failing health following a stroke, plus his continued disappointment over the lost Devonshire quartos, prompted him to sell the rest of his collection. He chose not to offer it at auction, which might have netted him the best prices. He could have also sold it en bloc to another collector with the hope of achieving close to its retail value. But Perry did not offer his library to Henry Huntington, Henry Folger, or any other private collector. Instead, in July, he sold it at a discount to the dealer Rosenbach for about half a million dollars.6 The bookman gloated over his good fortune: “I [had] purchased the then finest collection of Shakespeare books in America.” He was in the catbird seat to play Folger and Huntington against each other for ownership of Perry’s best books.

  The legendary Philadelphia bookseller Dr. Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach became “perhaps the only bookseller that has ever interrupted a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Standard Oil Company.” Folger had been an “old and faithful customer” since 1903, when he became Rosenbach’s “first customer.”7 Folger respected Rosenbach’s intelligence and knowledge and the two shared a sympathetic enthusiasm for Shakespeare. The committee met at ten AM every day to discuss Standard business. Rosenbach was eager to find out which of the Perry treasures Folger was interested in acquiring. The dealer, informed by Standard underlings that the meeting could not be interrupted, proffered a card on which he wrote the news, and which was taken to Folger: “I have just purchased the library of Marsden Perry. Can you see me for a minute?” Folger, no doubt fearing the competition he might face from Huntington and others, rushed out of the meeting and asked Rosenbach, “Will you give me the first choice?”8