The Millionaire and the Bard : Henry Folger's Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio by Mays Andrea

Author:Mays, Andrea [Mays, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The monumental events of 1911 did not dampen Henry Folger’s Foliomania. The only disruption to his collecting seems to have involved his annual summertime pilgrimage to England. On July 17, in a letter to Captain Robinson, he revealed, “We have had to give up our usual trip to London, as I did not wish to be away in view of the work to be done on the Standard Oil [matter].”21 He still managed to buy five First Folios that year.

That fall, Henry planned to be a major bidder at a Sotheby’s sale of the famous Huth collection, which included many fine lots of Shakespeariana. He and Emily combed through and annotated the thousands of pages of the auction catalogues printed for the occasion. In a masterstroke, an anonymous American intervened before the auction and made an offer for the best Shakespeare lots, an offer that proved too good for the seller to refuse. Hopeful bidders who arrived at the auction with their presale catalogues found, to their dismay, the coveted lots withdrawn. The New York Times reported the exciting news in a November 11 page-one story: “Shakespeare Rarities Sold, American May Have Bought Editions Withdrawn from Huth Auction.” The Times revealed that “the Shakespeare Folios and quartos, numbered 1,187 to 1,228 in the catalogue of the Huth Library, have been disposed of by private treaty, and consequently will not be included in the sale at auction announced for November 24.” The story teased readers with an air of mystery: “Both the name of the purchaser of the Huth Shakespeare folios and quartos and the price paid are at present a matter of speculation, but the general idea is that they will go to America.” It was a secret move worthy of Henry Folger, but Alexander Smith Cochran, not Folger, had staged the coup.22 Alexander Smith Cochran, the America’s Cup defender, had inherited thirty million dollars upon the death of his uncle, the carpet maker Warren B. Smith, allowing him to acquire his collection through the famed London book dealer Bernard Quaritch. The Huth sale continued in 1912.23 Rare book collecting was front-page news, and the papers covered the competition the way they covered horse racing on the sports pages. After Cochran bought the Huth Shakespeare lots privately, en bloc, the New York Times offered its readers not just the story but a detailed, bibliographic catalogue listing every item in the collection. Despite being beaten out at the Huth auction, Folger bought two more First Folios that December, one for $2,500 (W 109, F 51), and a copy that had been owned by Thomas Hanmer, the eighteenth-century Shakespeare editor, for $6,650 (W 74, F 16).

In 1911, Henry’s Shakespeare mentor Horace Howard Furness tried to tease his protégé into revealing his great secret: the number of First Folios he possessed. “Tell me,” he wrote to Folger, “that I may have it in black and white, how many First Folios you have. I long to be pea-green with envy.” When the scholar learned that Folger had forty, he nicknamed his favorite collector “Forty Folio Folger.

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