by Andrea Mays
Where should he look next? Folger had eliminated the three sentimental favorites—Amherst, Nantucket, and New York—and had not been moved by appeals for Chicago or Stratford-upon-Avon. Henry wrote a list of potential locations for the library and crossed off unsuitable candidates. Emily described her husband’s thinking. “As time passed,” she said, “he came to favor Washington. That city is the common capital of the whole United States; it belongs to all the people. It is advantageously situated, it is beautiful, and it constantly is growing in cultural significance. Since the collection was to be given to the whole people, it seemed fitting that it should be placed in the District of Columbia.”3
In 1918, the Folgers had enjoyed an impromptu visit to Washington, D.C., that later helped them choose the home for the library. “During the World War, Henry and I,” Emily remembered, “journeying to Hot Springs, found ourselves delayed by dislocated railroad schedules, and used the time walking about the city in the rain, viewing possible sites.”4 They walked through the white marble great hall at Union Station, pushed through the bronze revolving doors, gazed up Delaware Avenue, and saw it, looming straight ahead, three blocks away—the great dome of the U.S. Capitol. They decided to go for a walk. Drawn by the gleaming, white, cast-iron dome, they continued south. When they were halfway to the Capitol and they crossed Constitution Avenue, they saw, if they glanced to their right, the shiny marble exterior walls of the Russell Senate Office Building, site of the recent 1912 hearings on the Titanic disaster.
The Capitol was stunning. It was a mountain of marble—outer walls of thick slabs; wide, white steps cascading down from the East Front like the sculpted tiers of a wedding cake; and tall columns. Everything was white. What was not natural white marble—like the great iron dome—was painted white. Emily was familiar with the city. She had spent her early childhood in Washington. Her fondness and familiarity with the city had, no doubt, a positive effect on the choice of Washington as the location for their library. Perhaps that was the moment Henry Folger said for the first time, “Yes, someday I will build mine of white marble, too.”
Later, one of the Folgers’ advisors suggested that they choose Capitol Hill as the site for their Shakespeare library. Henry was inclined to agree. He drew maps of the area east and southeast of the U.S. Capitol, and evaluated at least four different locations on the Hill, varying in total cost between about $125,000 and $300,000, according to his handwritten notes and estimates that he scribbled on stationery from the Raleigh Hotel, at Twelfth and Pennsylvania, his base of operations during scouting. A trusted advisor told the Folgers to look at East Capitol Street.
As Henry and Emily stood on the eastern edge of the Capitol grounds, they looked east, just across First Street, at another beautiful structure, the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. A triumphant edifice of the Beaux-Arts style, completed in 1897, it radiated American optimism and confidence. In the mid-1840s, when Abraham Lincoln first came to Washington as a newly elected congressman, he lived in a boarding house that had once occupied part of the site. The Folgers crossed First Street, walked east on East Capitol Street, and, passing the Jefferson Building on their right, continued to the corner of East Capitol and Second Street. They were now in Washington’s historic Capitol Hill district, one of the city’s oldest residential neighborhoods. There, on the south side of East Capitol between Second and Third Streets, they beheld a block-long stretch of beautiful nineteenth-century brick row houses—“Grant’s Row,” the developer had called it—that had seen better days. It was a historic street. From where they stood, their view of the great dome was unobscured and unsurpassed. The Library of Congress—that architectural confection—was only a block away. It might be desirable to have two great libraries in complementary locations.
After searches, inquiries, and comparisons, the Folgers chose the place to build their Shakespeare memorial library. It would be Washington, or not at all. Henry Folger loved the Grant’s Row location, but he confronted the same obstacle that had defeated him in New York. The fourteen houses on Grant’s Row were private property—each structure and lot belonged to a different owner. He would have to acquire them individually, without letting the group of owners know what he was doing, and then tear them down all at once. If word got out that a millionaire was buying up the properties, then holdout owners could demand exorbitant prices for their lots. It was not difficult for the president of Standard Oil to solve this problem. He would buy the parcels in secret. Front men acting on his behalf would negotiate with the owners and buy all the land. Only then, once he controlled the whole block, would Folger reveal his plan.
The land was cheaper than in New York, so Folger went forward and undertook the task of assembling a property of sufficient size, with the help of real estate agents, who kept Folger’s name and his plan out of the public eye. As early as 1918, Folger was corresponding with Washington, D.C., real estate agents about property acquisition. Perhaps in an attempt to maintain secrecy, Henry dealt with several of them to conceal from any one of them his real purpose. His correspondence supports the idea that he wanted to make discreet inquiries without anyone knowing what he was doing.5 To one trusted real estate agent he sent a hand-drawn map of the area east of the dome, with properties marked by Folger: “Inquire very cautiously indeed, to learn in a general way what each would probably cost.” Folger offered to pay the agent’s expenses, instructing him to “get what money you need from Mr. Welsh.” Alexander G. Welsh was Folger’s secretary and Man Friday at Standard Oil. For years, he had performed many confidential financial tasks for Henry: depositing his dividend checks, sending to Henry’s father his Standard Oil dividends, and handling some of the massive paperwork and personal correspondence Folger conducted with hundreds of book dealers over the years. Welsh was also charged with picking up valuable shipments and delivering them to Folger, and to storage.6
Through the early 1920s, the Folgers read up on the city that they had adopted for their library. They crammed one file with newspaper clippings and another with magazine articles about Washington as a cultural capital, including the entire June 1923 National Geographic, a special issue devoted to Washington, D.C., and containing articles like “The Capitol, Wonder Building of the World,” “Washington, the Pride of the Nation,” and “The Sources of Washington’s Charms.” The same folder contains Henry Folger’s holographic notes on publications and brochures he gathered about other libraries.
Planning the library would require Folger to make major readjustments in the way he lived. From now on, he would have to hold significant assets in reserve for land and construction. He would have to discipline his collecting habits and, as difficult as that might be, make fewer and less grand purchases. If he hoped to build a library, he could not buy any more $50,000 or $100,000 books. The price he had paid for the Pavier Quarto alone would finance ten percent of the anticipated cost of the library project. Of course, he could not stand on the sidelines for long. It was still only a question of when—not if—he would open his checkbook again for some extravagant new acquisition.
But for now, beginning in 1920, Folger seemed to bow to the new austerity of the times and revised his collecting strategy. For the next year and a half, between January 1920 and May 1921, he did not buy any First Folios, not even inexpensive, imperfect, or inconsequential copies. But it did not take long before he broke his short streak of fiscal restraint. In May 1921, no longer able to resist, he purchased a First Folio for $13,000 (W 76, F 18). He also continued to purchase large quantities of inexpensive books. These were not collector’s prizes, but they were valuable as research and reference titles, and essential for the kind of library that Folger had in mind. The correspondence between Henry and Rosenbach between May and July 1921 is evidence of the level of attention that the collector gave to even these lesser purchases. On May 21, Folger wrote to the dealer about acquiring more items from Marsden Perry’s collection:
Probably you have gone through the package of cards for t
he Perry books, so that you know how many there are, and what a task it is to examine them all. I have put in a good many hours, and am sending you by registered mail to-day, the cards of the books which appeal to me, although I think the number will be increased as I study the rest of the cards. Those describing books I already have I am putting to one side and will return to you promptly for such other use as you may wish to make of them.
Folger, always the careful buyer, did not ask Rosenbach to name a group price for those dozens of cheap titles. He wanted to know what the dealer proposed to charge him for each individual book. “What I would like to know, first of all, is the price asked for each one of these items. If you think I should see them be good enough to put in any books you send over the cards belonging with them . . . as [the cards] are of value in suggesting why the books are put into a Shakespeare Library.”
On July 6, 1921, Folger wrote to Rosenbach at his New York office at 273 Madison Avenue. This letter, perhaps more than any other that Folger sent the dealer, reveals the meticulousness he exhibited in even the smallest transactions, even at the height of his wealth and power. “There may be a few of the items, which, for one reason or another I will not wish, but I think I will need nearly all of them.” Folger bought additional items from the Marsden Perry collection. On July 22, Rosenbach sent him a receipt for $922.50—including a credit of $270 for returns. The original inventory of this purchase, typed on acidic paper, now aged brown and brittle, lists each item and its price, and contains, in Folger’s tiny handwriting, checks and marks indicating the purchases and returns. Even at this advanced stage of his business and collecting careers, Henry Folger handled all the details personally, without the help of a librarian or staff. The same man who had purchased the most expensive book in the world spent hours inspecting cartons of inexpensive books and hand-selecting the ones he would keep. He had ordered on approval $1,192.50 worth of books from the Perry collection, and had returned $270 worth, including a $12 item—a group of pamphlets. Henry Huntington would have bought these inexpensive books sight unseen, inspected none of them personally, and left it to his staff to deal with the petty details. But to Folger, every book—whatever its value—was worthy of his personal attention. And no amount of money—no matter how little—was too small to save.7
Around the same time, Rosenbach, the chatty publicity hound who had divulged the secret of the Pavier Quarto and the last person Henry would take into his confidence, and who had no idea of Henry Folger’s long-range plans for his collection, suggested that Folger might consider building a library. Rosenbach had mastered the power of suggestion and had made an art of hinting to his major collectors what course they should follow. It was a method by which the dealer obtained information about their plans. On June 3, 1921, Rosenbach wrote to Henry about an important artwork: “Mr. Joseph Widener has kindly consented to send in from his home, Lynnewood Hall, the famous original drawing of Cruikshank: The Birth of William Shakespeare, and I am sending it for your inspection to our place in New York.” Folger, an enthusiastic if indiscriminate buyer of art related to Shakespeare, coveted the piece. Two weeks later, Rosenbach sent a black-and-white photograph of the Cruikshank taken in Marsden Perry’s home, when it was still part of that collection: “Perhaps if you erect a library building some day it will have the place of honor, the same as in Perry’s. I enclose a photograph showing how it looks in the latter’s home.” Little did Rosenbach know what plans Folger had already set into motion.
By the end of 1921, Henry Folger had accomplished the first two steps of his grand philanthropic mission—he had chosen the home city for his Shakespeare library, and he had started buying the lots to assemble the parcel where it would be built. He was looking forward to the next steps: gaining complete control of the block, demolishing Grant’s Row, designing his library, and breaking ground. That, he anticipated, might take several years. In the meantime, in 1920 and 1921, he remained unsatisfied as a collector. He had not bought a major First Folio in a few years. He had acquired the Gilburne copy, but its desirability was exclusive to its romantic, if unproven story. There were other great First Folios still out there, in private hands not his own. One of them, one of the best and most elusive of all, had been on his “want list” for more than twenty years. He had made provision for an endowment to finance the operating expenses of the library. In his judgment, he could afford to open his checkbook again and renew his hunt for all First Folios, great and small.
In early 1922, Folger went on a First Folio buying binge. He bought a fine one in January for $22,750 (W 129, F 71), a weak copy in February for $3,450 (W 62, F 4), and a third in March for $9,130 (W 79, F 21). In April, he received an unexpected letter that took him back almost twenty years. It was from Rosenbach and it was about a First Folio. Somehow the dealer had obtained a copy of a letter dated November 1, 1902, from Coningsby Sibthorp, the former owner of the Vincent Folio, to Sidney Lee, the bibliographer. It was the very letter in which Sibthorp had quoted, for the first time, a price of £10,000 for the Vincent copy.
Now, nineteen years later, Rosenbach had discovered Sibthorp’s letter to Lee and sent it on to Folger: “Enclosed herewith find a letter relating to the famous Coningsby Sibthorp first folio edition of Shakespeare, which please accept with my compliments. Are you the American gentleman referred to therein? The letter was written to Sidney Lee just before his departure to America in 1902.”8 Ignorant of Folger’s epic chase for the book, he had always wondered what had happened to it. Rosenbach could not resist asking Folger if he owned the Vincent copy.
In May 1922, Folger learned of an opportunity to acquire one of the most desirable First Folios in private hands—the celebrated Burdett-Coutts volume. The English Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts owned an exceptional copy in excellent condition with all of its original leaves. She had purchased it in July 1864 at the auction of the famous library of George Daniel, paying the then-record sum of £716. Daniel, a writer, poet, and book collector, also had a penchant for theatrical relics. In addition to owning a copy of each of the four Shakespeare folios, he acquired two prized possessions belonging to David Garrick. The first was a cane, the second a cassolette—a carved casket made from the mulberry tree purported to have been planted by Shakespeare.9 The First Folio from his collection was a beautiful and very tall copy, sold in the year of the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. The price was a high-water mark at the time. Its distinguished provenance included the Roxburghe library sale in 1812. Folger’s contemporary, the bibliographer Seymour de Ricci, praised it as one of the “choicest copies in private hands.”10 The Baroness, perhaps inspired by the cassolette owned by George Daniel, stored the book in a gorgeous, elaborately carved wooden casket. This book chest was not made from any ordinary tree. Queen Victoria had presented Burdett-Coutts with a gift of wood taken from Herne’s Oak, a famous tree dating to Shakespeare’s time, and mentioned by him in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The Baroness had used it to fashion the casket. The elaborate carvings on the box depict characters from The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare’s initials, and symbols of the Globe Theatre. It was an important work of art in its own right. She also owned a second, less impressive copy of the First Folio that was nevertheless interesting as it contained the rare canceled first page of Troilus and Cressida.11
Henry Folger had known about her two copies of the Folio for years, and as early as 1903, during his pursuit of the Vincent copy, he had written about them to Railton at Sotheran, when he sent the firm a “want list” of First Folios he hoped to acquire. Sotheran advised him that a quest for the fine Burdett-Coutts copy was hopeless. The book was considered an English treasure, and of course, the dealer reported, such a titled and wealthy family would never sell it. How many times had Folger heard that line? And how many times since then had he snapped up rare books that experts had advised would never come on the market?
Now, after almost two decades of waiting, he would have his chance. Christie’s announced that th
e Baroness’s library would be sold at auction. Rosenbach entered the race for the Burdett-Coutts copies, suggesting to Folger that there might be a chance to buy the books privately before they were sold by Christie’s . . . if the price was high enough. Folger replied by cabling “£12000 FOR TWO FOLIOS SEEMS EXCESSIVE.” He changed his mind the next day and cabled “IF NECESSARY PAY £12000.” Then he sent a final cable that stated “WISH FOLIOS.” That was all Rosenbach needed to know. In Folger’s vocabulary, those two words signaled the dealer to spend whatever was necessary.
In the end, there would be no long courtship, no opportunity to negotiate an advantageous price, and no private sale. The heirs preferred to take their chances on the auction block. The highest bidder would claim the prize. On May 15, Henry took the finer copy for $52,070 (£8,600) (W 63, F 5). It was the new world-record price for a First Folio, surpassing by a few thousand what Henry had paid in 1903 for the Vincent copy, though almost no one knew it. The mercenary auctioneer had separated the book from its custom-made casket, hoping to attract bidders for the Herne’s Oak relic alone. Without the book, no one wanted its empty box—customized with a compartment to fit this particular First Folio—so Folger won it for a few hundred pounds. He also purchased in a separate lot the voluminous scrapbooks assembled by Burdett-Coutts on the history of the volume. That was not the end of the sale for Henry. He also took home the second copy (W 68, F 10) for $32,400 (£5,400), and a fanciful chair once owned by David Garrick.
England mourned the loss of this historic First Folio. The May 24, 1922, issue of Punch published a full-page cartoon depicting an American millionaire named “Autolycus, U.S.A.” looting England’s treasures.12 Autolycus, a character from Greek mythology who possessed skills of theft and trickery, is also a character in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a roguish “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” (Act IV, Scene iii). But no matter. The Bodleian affair had been England’s last major victory in the folio wars. Folger had bought the Burdett-Coutts folios. Not one English patriot had seen fit to top his high bid. He had won the war of the books that the English press had declared against him years prior. Indeed, Folger, along with other Americans like Huntington, had routed their critics. As a symbol of his triumph, Folger bought the original artwork for the Punch cartoon and added it to his collection. In that year, Folger’s salary was $100,000.