The Millionaire and the Bard

by Andrea Mays

  That was not the only work of art that Folger bought in 1922. He continued to buy important artworks related to Shakespeare. One of the Fuseli oil paintings from the long-defunct Boydell Shakespeare Gallery found its way into the collection of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and in December 1922, through the London bookseller Maggs Bros., it went to Folger.

  With five new First Folios—including the two Burdett-Coutts copies—and a major oil painting among his acquisitions, it had been a great year for Henry Folger. He inaugurated the New Year by opening a heartfelt letter from John D. Rockefeller dated January 1, 1923: “I would not be out-done in appreciation of your companionship, and the delightful associations of the long years, and notably of these later years, as the ranks of the older associates are thinning out and we of the Old Guard draw closer together.” The letter foreshadowed things to come. Henry did not know it yet, but the titan had bigger plans for him.

  Henry’s plans did not include the ever-persistent Sidney Lee. Folger had stonewalled him for years, and he offered no assistance for Lee’s amended First Folio Census of 1923, the latest—and third—edition of his original work published in 1902. By 1923, according to Lee, Henry Folger owned thirty-five copies of the First Folio. In fact, he already owned sixty-six.13

  At the end of the year, Folger divulged one of his best-kept and longest-held secrets—his hitherto anonymous ownership of the Vincent First Folio. The article that he published in The Outlook shortly after he acquired “the most precious book in the world” had created suspicion in bibliophile circles that he owned the book, but he did not admit ownership in the article, and in the years since he had never acknowledged possession of it. By 1923, Folger was such a famous collector—the purchase of the Marsden Perry Pavier Quarto in 1919 and the Burdett-Coutts First Folios in 1922 had spoiled what little remaining anonymity he still possessed—that he saw no harm in confessing that he owned the best First Folio in the world. On December 23, 1923, Folger wrote to Yale professor of English C. F. Tucker Brooke, who had founded the Yale Shakespeare edition of the plays. What had once been an obsessive secret became a casual admission:

  I have just finished reading, with great satisfaction, your article on the Folio of 1623 in the October Yale Review. In the interest of having the record of Shakespeare Folios as accurate as possible, I venture to call attention to the last paragraph of your article, in which you speak of the Augustine Vincent presentation copy from Jaggard as “lately in the possession of Mr. Charles C. Sibthorp Coningsby.” This copy belonged to Charles C. Sibthorp, but some fifteen years ago he sold it to me, and since that time it has been in my possession.14

  Nineteen twenty-three marked another important milestone in Folger’s business career. He was elected chairman of the board of Standard Oil of New York. He would retain that position until his retirement from the company. The new position and the new economic opportunities it offered were good for Henry’s career and collection.

  Folger devoted most of 1924 to business, not collecting. His agents continued to negotiate for the purchase of the fourteen lots on Grant’s Row. Folger and Rockefeller held identical opinions on how a great business should be run, shared the same values on business ethics and stewardship, disdained personal greed that displaced a higher duty, and, as members of what Rockefeller had called the “old guard,” possessed unmatched knowledge of the history of the oil business and an unrivaled expertise in all elements of its operation. And to the extent their expertise and talents combined to increase the value of the company, the shareholders, including Rockefeller and Folger, benefited tremendously. In April, he bought an unexceptional First Folio for $7,400 (W 125, F 67). In December, he began an eight-month run of major purchases with the acquisition of a fine copy for $37,000, one of his five most expensive copies (W 126, F 68). He bought another copy for $32,000 in March 1925 (W 127, F 69), and that August, he paid $19,500 for another (W 128, F 70). That year, he also acquired a valuable and exotic curiosity—a copy of the Geneva Bible of 1569 once owned by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, the man Anti-Stratfordians proposed as their candidate for alternative author of Shakespeare’s plays. Henry Folger dismissed the claim as absurd, but was happy to have de Vere’s Bible.

  All through 1924 and 1925, Henry engaged in active correspondence with the real estate agents he had enlisted in his East Capitol Street scheme. After purchasing several of the houses, he encountered an obstacle—a couple named Newhauser were holdouts in negotiations over their Grant’s Row house, refusing to sell for less than $100,000. Folger’s real estate agent, who thought the price outrageous—which it was—suggested that Henry paint the other houses and raise the rents. The advice suggests that this real estate agent did not fully know what Folger had in mind. Folger demurred, writing, “I am rather inclined to think that any appearance of putting the property in better condition may encourage the [holdouts] to delay their decision.”15 To put the holdout demand in context, another real estate agent had suggested that he should be able to acquire all fourteen properties on the south side of East Capitol between Second and Third Streets for just $260,000. He had already been at it for several years, and it would take him nine years, in total, to acquire all fourteen parcels. In the end, he would pay $317,000 for the houses on the fifty-thousand-square-foot tract.

  Chapter 12

  “Portrait of a Collector”

  —A. S. W. ROSENBACH

  FROM THE mid-1920s onward, Henry Folger’s purchases of First Folios, especially expensive ones, became routine. And his relentless pursuit of First Folios continued to drive market prices higher. His plans for a library were becoming real, and he collected with renewed urgency. In January 1926, he bought a copy for $6,050 (W 61, F 3); in June, he paid $6,075 for another copy missing two of the plays (W 132, F 80). The following month, he purchased two copies, one for $9,900 (W 131, F 73), and a fine, expensive one for $41,000 (W 130, F 72).

  Once he had become known as an important collector, Folger often received letters from booksellers, librarians, or curators seeking to examine or exhibit this treasure or that, from bibliophiles and scholars pleading for access to his collection for their various research projects, and from bibliographers like Sidney Lee inquiring about his inventory. In January 1923, Lee, by now president of the Shakespeare Society, complained about the inaccessibility of Folger’s collection: “He seems to think First Folios ought to be put in a bin in cellars like fine vintages.” Lee hoped that “now that America has gone dry, other American collectors will not attempt to fill their empty bins with First Folios.”1 Henry ignored most of the requests, but in July 1927, he received one request he could not. Belle da Costa Greene wrote to Folger on behalf of a scholar who hoped to make use of some of his books. Greene, whom Morgan had hired in 1905, had become a legendary society figure in her own right, and Folger owed her at least the courtesy of a reply. Even to Greene, however, Folger replied that it would be impossible for him to help her: “I hope, at some time in the near future, to have a proper place for storing my collection, so that it will be accessible to all who wish to make use of it. At present it is all packed up in some 1700 cases and put away in several warehouses.”2

  “The near future” that Folger mentioned to Greene was getting close enough that it was time to commission oil portraits of him and Emily to hang in the library they would build. Many businessmen of similar status to Folger had ordered such portraits early in their careers to display in their residences. Henry was too modest for that, but it would not, he felt, be inappropriate to display in his Shakespeare library token reminders of the husband and wife who had built the collection.

  He chose the artist Frank Salisbury. Salisbury, recommended by Folger’s friend Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, was a society, political, and court painter who specialized in portraits of leading figures of the Anglosphere on both sides of the Atlantic. His subjects included King George V and various British coronation scenes; presidents Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman; John D. Rockefeller Jr.
and J. P. Morgan; British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery; and, strangely, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

  Salisbury recalled his introduction to Folger:

  One day in New York I was rung up by the private secretary of a man who wished to be unknown but asked if I would paint two portraits. He turned out to be Henry Clay Folger, President of the Standard Oil Company, but better known as the founder of the marvelous Shakespeare Library at Washington, which was then coming into being. He wanted portraits of himself and his wife which could be hung in the building.3

  Salisbury asked Henry to choose a favorite object to feature in the painting: “At one sitting . . . I said I should like him to be holding something in his hands.” Folger considered the matter. Whatever single book he selected would symbolize the meaning of his whole collection, of his life’s work. One candidate seemed obvious—the Vincent First Folio, “the most precious book in the world.” But the obsessive collector of First Folios decided to pose without a copy of his trademark book. Salisbury described what he brought instead: “Wrapped up in newspaper, [was] a precious Shakespeare quarto published before the First Folio, for which he had paid thousands of pounds and refused half as much again.” Henry had chosen his copy of the Pavier Quarto. Salisbury marveled at the characteristic, understated way Folger handled the book: “Coming to the studio that day, he carried it in a newspaper wrapping and came by the subway, alone.” It was a routine trip for a man who had for years taken the streetcar across the Brooklyn Bridge as part of his daily commute to Twenty-Six Broadway.

  When Emily Folger sat for her portrait, Salisbury was struck by the appearance of her hands: “What a noble memorial he and Mrs. Folger have left the world, a heritage for all generations! Mrs. Folger’s right hand was crippled with writer’s cramp through cataloguing the collection, but what of that? Altogether the collection has seventy thousand volumes by or about Shakespeare and his contemporaries. No wonder Mrs. Folger’s hands were crippled in cataloguing them.”

  Henry’s choice of Salisbury attests to his indiscriminate taste in art. In the field of rare books, Folger’s taste was splendid. In the field of art, it was miserable. The murky portraits, while serviceable likenesses of Henry and Emily, are dominated by brown, green, and yellow tones, and appear dark and muddy. The history of art has left the workmanlike Salisbury behind as a forgotten footnote. In the 1980s, when his home and studio were broken up and his paintings dispersed at auction, they brought pitifully low prices, and today, his works have almost no commercial value. But the Folgers were delighted with their portraits, and they had black-and-white photographic copies made, which they autographed and distributed to friends.

  Henry was too modest to hang the portraits at home while he waited to commence construction of his library: “As the library was not completed when they were finished” in 1927, Salisbury recalled, “the portraits were put into a case and stored for years in a depository with Mr. Folger’s collection.”

  In 1928, Henry bought four more First Folios, two of them at some of the highest prices he had ever paid: $47,500 (W 133, F 75) and $68,750 (W 134, F 76); indeed, the latter was the highest dollar figure he would ever pay for a First Folio. This was also among the last copies he purchased.4 These purchases, in addition to other books he acquired in 1928, suggest that he was neither slowing down nor cutting back on his collecting in anticipation of breaking ground for his library.

  Then, in the same year, Henry Folger made a major and unique purchase. It was something that throughout his adult life he had neglected to acquire. He bought a home. It was in Glen Cove, Long Island, at Eleven St. Andrews Lane, across the street from his beloved Nassau Country Club, close to the homes of Charlie Pratt and Pratt’s siblings. In his retirement, he would play golf, plan the library, and continue to collect.

  Despite expensive First Folios, his ongoing shipping of crates of other books from England, and the purchase of a home, Henry Folger’s chief preoccupation in 1928 was the land on which he planned to build his library. He now owned more than seventy-five copies of the First Folio. By January 1928, Folger had purchased all fourteen of the East Capitol Street lots, at a cost of $317,000, and he had cause to celebrate. It had taken eight years to assemble the parcel, much longer than it would take to actually build the library, if all went according to plan. He was eager to demolish the buildings, hire an architect, approve plans, and begin construction. He reviewed his finances and his Standard Oil stock holdings to confirm that he would have easy access to the $750,000 he expected his library to cost. Unbeknownst to him, another party wanted that land, one that had the power to take it, even from him. For some time, the federal government had been scouting Capitol Hill for real estate to expand the overcrowded Library of Congress. Once that library selected the spot for its new annex building, the United States government, using its power of eminent domain, would condemn the land and seize it from its owners. Just one block east of the Library of Congress, along East Capitol Street, ran a one-block stretch of brick row houses that seemed very tempting to library officials. It was Grant’s Row. Buried in Henry Folger’s private archives is a handwritten note he scribbled in haste on a scrap of paper: “Gov. going to take property.”

  That January, Folger learned from a newspaper article that the Library of Congress planned to expand, and that Congress was about to seize the entire block bordered on the north by East Capitol Street, on the south by Pennsylvania Avenue, on the east by Third Street, and on the west by Second Street. Half of that block included his Grant’s Row properties. He did not have long to act. Some men, faced with opposing Congress, might have conceded defeat. Henry decided to fight. But how? He could tap his wealth, connections, and the name of Standard Oil to battle Congress head-on. Brute force might prevail—Henry could try to compel New York’s senators and congressmen to bend to his will and derail the legislation—but such a blatant political play risked provoking other members who hated Standard Oil and who might do anything to spite its chairman. Folger mustered his businessman’s savvy. His job had always been to solve difficult problems. Throughout his career he had tried to do that through cooperation, not intimidation.

  He decided on another approach. No government official stood to gain more from taking Henry’s land than Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress. If Folger could persuade Putnam that it was not in his best interest to seize Grant’s Row, then Folger might turn the librarian into an ally. Henry sat at his desk at Twenty-Six Broadway and drafted a personal, confidential note to Putnam. In a brilliant move, Folger decided not to threaten him, but to entice him.

  First, he revealed that it was he who owned the land. He explained what he planned to do with it, unless Congress interfered. He would build a structure and institution that “would harmonize with the Library [of Congress]” and would house his “library of Shakespeareana,” which was “finer than anything that has ever been acquired.” He revealed that it was his ambition “to help make the United States a center for literary study and progress.” He had considered other sites, in the United States and abroad, but he “preferred to consider Washington as its permanent home, being satisfied that it is of sufficient value and importance to add to the dignity of your City.”

  Henry expressed shock that the federal government planned to seize his land: “Until I saw this newspaper mention of the Library expansion it had never occurred to me that the site I had selected might be considered within the zone of possible Government territory.”

  Of all people, the Librarian of Congress needed no introduction to Henry Folger or his fabulous collection. Bibliophiles had long wondered what Folger planned to do with his hoard. And now Putnam was the first outsider to be let in on the secret. The news thrilled him, as Henry knew it would. Now, Folger brought up the subject that he counted on to terrify the librarian: “This all leads up to my question: should I give up my thought of making Washington the choice for a location? The plan I am perfecting includes an adequate and proper building and a considerable
endowment to care for the library and to add to it.”

  Without threatening Putnam, and in the politest way possible, the chairman of Standard Oil dictated his terms: if the government takes away his land, then he will take away his library.

  Putnam snapped at Folger’s bait. He telegraphed an immediate reply: “Your letter of yesterday is of extraordinary interest and supreme importance.” He wanted to see Folger as soon as possible. “May I confer with you on some day of next week at place and hour convenient to you?” Putnam was so excited that he lacked any patience to await a reply. He told his secretary to telephone Twenty-Six Broadway at once, but he could not reach the chairman. Putnam followed up his telegram with a longer letter telling Folger what a wonderful idea it was to build his Shakespeare library in Washington: “Your letter of yesterday opens a prospect more thrilling (I am frank to say) not merely for the National Capitol, but for the cultural interests of this country, than anything that has happened for Washington since the establishment of the Freer Gallery.”

  Putnam would be happy to defer to Folger’s project. Attracting this new and major Shakespeare library to Washington was more important to the Librarian of Congress than building an annex for his own institution: