It’s a dangerous thing to be a Shakespeare first folio. In 2006, Dr Williams’ Library in London decided that it would prefer to have £2,500,000 than its copy, which it put up for auction at Sotheby’s. In 2003, Oriel College in Oxford sold its 1623 Comedies, Histories and Tragedies to a Getty. And now there are rumours that the Senate House Library at the University of London is planning to put its copies of the first, second, third and fourth folios up for sale, so that it can devote itself to attracting more readers and recovering the government funding that it lost in 2006. The folios are worth an awful lot of money on the open market but according to the Library’s director Christopher Pressler they are rarely consulted. Nobody is going to notice their absence.

I have to confess to an instinctive revulsion for libraries that want to sell off their books–the role of a library being to collect books and to preserve their collections, especially those extraordinary items that (like this one) they have accepted as bequests. Who is going to want to donate their prized possessions to the University of London after this? Of course, libraries would be far cheaper to run if they didn’t have to look after books at all … many of them would make lovely shopping centres.

This particular sell-off is more perverse than average. Were the dollar-signs not ringing in their eyes, the custodians of this collection would doubtless see the possession of so many Shakespeare folios as part of its claim to status. The first folio in particular is a legendary book, an ur-text of English literary culture (half of the plays would have been lost had this edition not appeared in 1623). It is also a landmark of print history; each surviving copy is unique, and each bears the scars of its past in ways which have been hugely generative for our understanding of how early publishing worked. These folios are books that should be in display-cases, and on the desks of researchers, rather than heading off to the highest bidder.

The claim that nobody has been consulting the books is the most infuriating of all. If you go into the average research library (though there are some very honorable exceptions), you tremble in fear if you want to call up an early printed edition of Shakespeare. Why do you want to see it? Have you written to the Director six months in advance? There is a microfilm you can consult, somewhere in a darkened vault… Librarians hide their treasures away and then cite the fact that nobody has looked at them when they want to sell them off.

Enough fuming… Anyone moved to protest about the proposed sale should write to Mr Pressler (christopher.pressler@london.ac.uk) or the Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor Sir Adrian Smith FRS (adrian.smith@london.ac.uk). Or you can sign a petition at http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/senate-house-library-university-of-london-reconsider-the-proposed-sale-of-its-first-four-shakespeare-folios