Buying Up the Bard

The TLS reviewer of Stephen Grant’s Collecting Shakespeare summarizes some of the intrigue, skullduggery, and determination that lie behind the creation of Washington’s Folger Shakespeare library:

“During their long marriage, the diminutive couple (he was five foot four, she five foot) devoted themselves to collecting books, pictures and objects (relics made from the Stratford mulberry tree were especially sought after) related to Shakespeare. What started as ‘an agreeable recreation,’ Henry Folger said, soon became ‘a delightful hobby’ and eventually ‘rather a tyrannical master.’ They pursued the subject with what comes over as a chilly obsessiveness. They avoided social life as much as they could, limited their time with their families, lived very frugally and modestly in rented homes, with rented furniture and a small domestic staff. Grant leaves little room to doubt that Folger was ‘tight with his money’; he haggled over prices with book dealers, doing his best to drive them down and ‘could be counted on to pay, but only on his terms.’ Those terms included absolutely no publicity. An article on Folger, written nearly two decades after his death, described him as ‘shy, taciturn,’ adding that he ‘lived by three rules: Never tell what you’ve done, what you are doing, or what you are going to do.’ ‘The American public,’ Grant says, ‘knew almost nothing about’ Folger. The couple concealed the extent of their acquisitions, failing to mention in 1924 in the one interview they ever gave that by then they owned sixty-seven copies of the First Folio.”

This wasn’t just a personality quirk. It was good business. At the time, rare books were fairly cheap, and the Folgers knew that prices would soar if word got out that they were buying up old Shakespeare volumes.

In any event, their strategy worked. When they were done, “they left 92,000 books, a remarkable building (it had air conditioning and made relatively early use of aluminium) on Capitol Hill, with a reading room, exhibition hall and theatre, and a considerable endowment, all of which have made the Folger one of the great libraries in the world and a wonderful place to work in and to visit.”