In 1905, Mr. Bernard Buchanan MacGeorge, of Glasgow, sold four Shakespeare folios in their original binding to Marsden J. Perry, of Providence, Rhode Island. He doubtless believed he was using his cunning Scotch wisdom to a high degree when he steadfastly held out for £10,000. At this price he figured he was doing himself a neat turn, because he had paid only £1700 for them six years before. But if he had been a bit cannier, a little more patient, he would have received two or three times the sum Mr. Perry paid him. When the balance of the MacGeorge Library was offered for sale at Sotheby’s in July 1924, all the bibliophiles in bookdom would have torn one another to bits to get the Shakespeare folios at the old price. But I was lucky enough to procure them when I purchased en bloc the Perry Library, and to-day they are in the library of Mr. Joseph Widener, at Lynnewood Hall, near Philadelphia.
Thank goodness, they are at least near home, where I can look at them to my heart’s content.
The history of the Shakespeare folios is an interesting one. Shakespeare’s genius was so overwhelming that even the least of the nitwits of his day appreciated him. His greatest contemporaries were the most eager to preserve his works. Immediately after his death in 1616 steps were taken to issue a complete edition of his plays. His manuscripts were probably collected, but, alas, not saved, and scholars of the time, many of whom had known him well, labored to procure a perfect text.
Three years passed. Then, in 1619, the English public was surprised to see issued a single volume containing nine plays. No one knows how many copies composed this edition, but it is a strange circumstance that but one copy is in existence to-day. I once owned it, but it finally passed to Mr. H. C. Folger, of New York, who added it to his remarkable collection of Shakespeareana. This one surviving copy is in its original binding. It has an index, too, in the quaint old handwriting of its first owner, Edward Gwynne, who proudly stamped his name in gilt on the outside cover. Even though I should not care to be dubbed a prophet in my own country, I do not hesitate to say that this book would bring at least $200,000 if it were sold on the block to-day.
This 1619 volume was but a makeshift, playing for its sale upon the magic name of Shakespeare. John Heminge and Henry Condell, both true and tried friends of the great Bard, and fellow actors, mentioned in his will, undertook to give the world a complete and correct edition of his plays. William Jaggard and his son Isaac were responsible for the printing, a laborious task when you consider that the volume consisted of one thousand double-column pages. Thus, the great first folio was finally issued in 1623, in a plain calf binding. It contained a portrait of William Shakespeare, with a leaf of verses on the opposite page by his famous contemporary, Ben Jonson. These are among the finest lines ever written concerning Shakespeare, and perhaps the greatest from Jonson’s pen. The original price of the first folio was five dollars a copy.
One pound in 1623! And yet in the years between 1700 and 1750 it had only advanced to ten, which reminds me of a good story. In 1790 the copy belonging to John Watson Reed was offered for sale. That astute collector, the Duke of Roxburghe, wanted it and commissioned an agent to buy it for him. The bidding started at five pounds and rose to the enormous sum of twenty guineas! Everyone was astounded. The duke’s agent grew faint-hearted and passed a slip of paper to him suggesting that His Grace retire from the contest. The duke replied with these memorable and appropriate words:—
Lay on, Macduff;
And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”
The folio finally fell to the duke for thirty-five pounds. How often, when I feel myself weakening at a sale, do I think of the old duke’s quotation from Macbeth. It should be the motto of every auction bidder.
The Duke of Roxburghe’s library was sold at Sotheby’s in 1812, and it included the first folio. It brought an advance of almost three hundred per cent, being purchased by the Duke of Devonshire for £100. It can be seen now in the Henry E. Huntington Library. The sale of this collection more than one hundred and fifteen years ago provided a sensation which is still talked about, and was not equaled until the auction of the Gutenberg Bible a year ago last February. As Thomas Frognall Dibdin said, it reverberated around the world. The Valdarfer Boccaccio was the high light in the Roxburghe sale. This notorious volume was the only perfect copy of the first edition of the Decameron. I have always thought that his flowery description of the bidding which took place in that “grand æra of Bibliomania,” as he was so pleased to term it, applies exactly to the tactics used in the modern auction room. Dibdin wrote as follows:—