The edition we saw - Henry Folger’s favorite - will be featured in an upcoming, permanent display at the library, set to open to the public on Nov. So really, when you get down to that sort of leaf by leaf examination of these copies, almost all of them have been manipulated, changed, improved over many, many years." “ dealers had what they called morgues, where they had damaged copies of books, where they could supply leaves to perfect and sophisticate other copies that they could then market as complete,” Prickman says. Greg Prickman, the Folger Library's Director of Collections, pages through Henry Folger's favorite First Folio. Imagine a patchwork skin like Frankenstein’s creature. Turning over the pages, Prickman explained that the book had gotten changed and “sophisticated” over time - a process where damaged leaves would be grafted with others to complete the volume. “This particular copy was discovered in the 19th century on a shelf in essentially a building associated with an English country house, where somebody was cleaning it out and came upon it and tossed it down to the person that was there with them and said, ‘This one's nothing. Prickman showed Here & Now’s Scott Tong a particularly large edition that was almost thrown out. across the street from the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress’ Jefferson building.Įach First Folio has its own history. So the Folgers kept at it, and today the research library they founded houses the largest Shakespeare collection in the world. Maybe that's enough.’ And Henry Folger said at one point, each copy has a reason for its existence.” “There were points in the Folger's collecting where in correspondence there's this sense of, ‘Well, maybe we should slow down. “I think obsession is a good word,” says Greg Prickman, Folger’s director of collections. Thanks to a buying spree that founders Henry and Emily Folger made over a century ago, the library already owns 82 copies. The Folger Shakespeare Library won’t be competing to acquire the book. The famous "Droeshout portrait" of Shakespeare from the First Folio. One of them is now on sale at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair - where it may go for millions of dollars The last one at auction sold for nearly $10 million, beating expectations. Only 235 copies of the First Folio are known to have survived - making them some of the most valuable books in the world. The Bard had been dead for nearly a decade, and without the Folio, we likely wouldn’t know about 18 of his plays - histories like “Julius Caesar,” tragedies like “Macbeth” and comedies like “Twelfth Night.” William Shakespeare’s friends and close collaborators succeeded at publishing his works in a huge book - the First Folio - 400 years ago. Shakespeare's first folio was published 400 years ago.
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