In October 1976, a book collector paid £2,400 (approximately £18,300 today) for a book in “damaged home-made burlap binding, which was in tatters”. The paper was “spongy”. Certain leaves were missing, certain leaves frayed, and certain leaves scrawled on. Could this be the same book that I have just seen – ahead of its appearance at “Firsts”: London's Rare Book Fair next month – and heard valued, informally but informedly, at something like a couple of million pounds?
Yes but, in some sense, no – the book in question is a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, and the collector who bought it was John Wolfson, now Honorary Curator of Rare Books at Shakespeare's Globe. Wolfson had the Folio's torn pages cleaned and mended; facsimiles and genuine loose leaves from other copies of the Folio took the place of missing leaves; the whole thing was rebound. Though the First Folio is familiar to Shakespeare scholars who have worked on it extensively, its appearance at “Firsts”, which takes place over a weekend early in June, at Battersea Evolution in Battersea Park, will nonetheless be a first for most people. It has spent the most part of the past four decades living a private life of its own in Manhattan, in the company of Wolfson's other remarkable books of the period.
Such opportunities to gawp must be seized: it has become relatively uncommon to see a First Folio out in the wild. An interested Shakespeare scholar could head to Washington, DC, to inspect the eighty-two copies now held at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The second largest collection, running to a mere dozen First Folios, belongs to Meisei University in Tokyo (including an intriguing annotated copy mentioned in the TLS a few weeks back). Further Folio-owning institutions may be found in Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Stratford-upon-Avon. All of which is good for scholarship, the general public (Folios make star exhibits both on- and offline) and the precious books themselves. Maybe 750 copies were printed; 200-and-something copies survive, in varying states of completeness, thanks to fire, water, rodents and the wiles of the book trade. The Folio protection programme is the work of many institutional hands. But this was not always the case.
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