News today that Raymond Scott, an antiques dealer, has been jailed for eight years for handling a copy of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio that had been stolen from the Durham University Library in 1998. In his summing-up, the judge claimed that Scott’s motive for dealing in this ‘quintessentially English treasure’ was ‘financial gain’; in particular, he ‘wanted to fund an extremely ludicrous playboy lifestyle in order to impress a woman [he] met in Cuba’.
Such a judgment confers a prophetic quality on one of the more curious aspects of Anthony James West’s magnum opus, a history of the Folio in four volumes, which began to appear in 2001. West calibrated the price of the Folio in the first three centuries of its life against the cost of bread (44 loaves on its first publication, 5,000 loaves by the 1850s). But for the twentieth century he instead compared it with the cost of ‘three luxury items … a Purdey shotgun, Russian caviar, and a Jaguar motor car’. ‘The purchaser of these items,’ he suggested, ‘is likely to have had certain characteristics in common with the purchaser of a First Folio–such as disposable wealth, aspects of lifestyle and taste, and perhaps the wish for “the esteem and envy of fellow men”‘. Or women, we might now add, with an eye to Mr Scott.
When West compiled his Census of Folios, documenting the whereabouts, provenance and physical condition of every surviving exemplar, he noted that the Durham copy was unavailable for inspection because it had been stolen. Bought by John Cosin sometime before 1632, this copy was incorporated into Peterhouse library in Cambridge during the Civil War, while its owner was exiled in France, but was later recovered to grace the episcopal library on Palace Green in Durham, which Cosin endowed in 1669. It thus has a claim to be the first First Folio to have sat on the shelves of a public library.
It’s good to hear that the stolen book will soon be on its way back home. And West’s work, which renders any individual copy of the Folio instantly identifiable, ought to make any ludicrous playboy think twice before raiding the library.