The Shakespeare Thefts (4 page)

Lafontaine’s copy has never been traced, and as far as we know, Lee never saw it. However, we
do
know that Sir William Martyn built the Hall at Athelhampton around the year 1485 and that it remained in the Martyn family for the next four generations. So the Lafontaine copy may have been the Martyn Copy. What has happened to it?

Tantalizing stories of this kind, the virtual “button on a bust,” intrigued my indefatigable colleague Anthony James West, who has been tracking “unfound” First Folios for decades, after discovering that many of the copies originally recorded by Lee in 1902 had disappeared without a trace. Some had been stolen from institutions (such as Durham University and Manchester University), and quite a number of privately owned First Folios had simply gone missing.

But they are not forgotten—largely because of Anthony James West.

West, a British businessman with a Harvard MBA, was a partner of the preeminent management-consulting firm Booz Allen. In his late fifties, however, he abruptly gave up his business career in order to pursue a PhD in English literature at University College, London. Looking for a dissertation project, Anthony hit on the idea of
compiling a new census of the locations of Shakespeare First Folios, since the one completed by Sidney Lee was nearly a century old and considerably out of date.

In 1989, Anthony began recording the known copies and attempting to locate others by publishing notices in various journals, searching auction records, and contacting dealers and possible owners. With a combination of tenacity and old-fashioned legwork, he was able to find an astounding
seventy
copies that had not appeared in Lee’s census. Anthony self-funded his research, and within a few short years he had gone through much of his personal fortune. (I’ve never been able to decide whether this was noble or foolish.)

In 1996, Anthony approached me at a reception at the World Shakespeare Congress in Los Angeles, where I was presenting a hypertext prototype for a new electronic edition of
Hamlet
that would enable users to access everything ever written about each line of the play.
⁶
He asked about the possibility of my putting together a research team to travel the globe in search of First Folios. I said, “When do we start?”

We next met at the Reform Club—the famed London gentlemen’s club from which Phileas Fogg began his voyage in Jules Verne’s
Around the World in Eighty Days
—a thoroughly appropriate venue in which to plan the campaign that would take us to the four corners of the globe. We started to bring our extraordinary team together.

We began with Donald L. Bailey. Don, a close friend of mine since our graduate school days at the University of Chicago, is an attorney licensed to practice in both Illinois and California, but he prefers to spend his time hunting for Shakespearean texts. (He had already tracked down every known copy of the first edition of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s
The Two Noble Kinsmen
when he came on board.) Don quickly established himself as a determined First Folio hunter with a velvet glove. Generous to a fault, he will shower owners and archivists with gifts and engage them in spirited conversations while he points out the unique features of their prized folio. Yet Don takes umbrage when librarians do not sufficiently appreciate the treasures in their care. On one occasion, when he had three copies of the First Folio out for examination and wanted to take a lunch break, he was flabbergasted when, after asking where he should put the volumes for safekeeping, the curator of the public institution said with disinterest, “Oh, just leave them on a cart.”

The next to join the team was Lara Hansen, MA. A hand-press printer and a systems analyst, Lara brought a remarkable combination of skill sets to the project: an understanding of printing practices in Shakespeare’s time and an awareness of cutting-edge methods of recording and processing the huge amount of data that the team accumulated in our enormous undertaking.
Lara literally went through a set of tires driving across America to examine First Folios. During one memorable three-week stretch, she saw a
different
folio each day as she worked her way from Ohio, to West Virginia, to upstate New York, down through New England, and into eastern Pennsylvania.

Sarah Stewart, who holds two MA degrees (one from King’s College London and a second from the University of Nevada), crisscrossed the European continent from Paris, to Cologne, to Berlin, to Geneva, to Padua, in search of First Folios and traveled throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland. She charmed owners ranging from English dukes and duchesses to reclusive American billionaires, one of whom was so impressed by her that when he acquired a single page that had been missing from his copy of the First Folio, he flew Sarah back to his private residence, at his expense, so that she could examine the newfound leaf.

Mark Farnsworth, MA, undertook the daunting task of examining the extensive collection of First Folios archived at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC (see photo section). Mark, who spent a considerable period of time on a mission in impoverished parts of South America, now found himself at arguably the polar opposite of material riches: at one point examining in a single day
twelve
copies of the First Folio with a street value of $72 million.

Trey Jansen, MA, an unassuming good ol’ boy from Texas, developed the sharpest eyes in the world for identifying First Folio watermarks using fiber-optic light sheets, and he proved to be the team’s secret weapon for identifying true First Folio leaves and distinguishing them from facsimiles and forgeries, especially in Japan.

Together, our team spent over a decade recording
every
detail of
every
known First Folio. We also hunted down leads on elusive copies. We are experts on every nuance of every First Folio that we have examined, and we have a 600,000-word reference work,
The Shakespeare First Folios: A Descriptive Catalogue
, to prove it.
⁷
To give you an idea of how exhaustive our analysis is, here is a section of a description from the
Catalogue
, detailing the damage and repairs that affect the text in a single copy of the Folio, the one in the Library of Congress:

The Tempest
A1
heavy water damage affects lower outer quadrant of all leaves through C2; affected replaced with printed facsimile.
A1
v vertical tear from foot affects 2 letters b63, 65.
A2
small tear b42 affecting 6 letters.
A2
v 22mm tear a42 affecting 4 letters.
A3
repaired tear at line b42 partially obscures 2 letters, printers ink spot a40 partially obscures 2 letters.
A3
v tear repair affects 7 letters.
A4
11mm tear b42 partially obscures 4 letters.
A4
v tear affects 2 letters.
B3
MS pen marks b2 partially obscuring 1 letter.

Bear in mind that this is only one section of the description (which also includes details on the history of the volume, its provenance and owners, its binding, transcriptions of all manuscript annotations, watermarks, press variants, and so on). You don’t have to fully understand all of this admittedly arcane data to know that having so many details recorded about an individual volume should give anyone pause when it comes to filching a First Folio. But this wasn’t always the case, as we found out as our quest unfolded.

The Durham University Copy

On June 16, 2008, Raymond Rickett Scott, a British citizen, brought a copy of what appeared to be a First Folio into the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, asking that it be authenticated. The head librarian, Richard J. Kuhta, later recalled the encounter in vivid detail:

He was dressed in tropical clothing; he had on a kind of oversized T-shirt with a very large fish on the front, lightweight slacks and loafers with no socks and a lot of jewelry—rings and bracelets. He apologized for his clothing and said if he’d had time he’d have worn a suit, but that
he’d just flown in from Cuba, where he had a villa… . He said he’d inherited his father’s construction building supplies business and had sold it and as a result he was very comfortably off. He said he had something to show me.
¹

Kuhta was alarmed by Scott’s rough treatment of the book. “He started flicking through the pages very quickly showing me it was a first edition. I was startled by the way in which the book was being handled.”

(How you are expected to handle the First Folio varies from library to library. Often you are given the book in a foam cradle; this is meant to protect the binding. Some libraries expect you to wear gloves to protect the pages from the oil on your fingers. This requirement makes sense for books that have pages made from wood pulp. The First Folio’s pages, however, are made from linen rags. The oil from your fingers will do much less damage than the tugging you will do with gloves, since the lack of a decent grip causes you to bend the pages a bit.)

Kuhta told Scott that the folio was “definitely interesting” but that he would like to examine it more closely. Scott left the book in Kuhta’s care.

Kuhta phoned Scott at his hotel later that day with the news that the book did indeed appear to be a previously unrecorded First Folio.

Scott suggested that they alert the
Washington Post
to publicize the discovery, but Kuhta urged caution,
saying that they needed to await further verification. He suggested flying in an independent expert, Stephen Massey, formerly head of the rare books and manuscripts department at Christie’s auction house. Scott paid $3,000 to cover Massey’s airfare from New York and hotel room in Washington, but he had to return to the United Kingdom before Massey arrived.

Massey meticulously examined the folio that Scott had brought into the Folger. Immediately he could see that the binding was missing and that the volume had been scoured of all identifying marks by someone who knew what he or she was doing. However, Massey recognized some key traits that this coverless “Cuban Discovery” shared with a copy that had been recorded in the Lee census of 1902 and had since gone missing. The dimensions of the copy in question (330 mm × 210 mm) exactly matched those of the First Folio that was stolen from Durham University in 1998.

Also, this “newly discovered” folio had a manuscript insertion on the table of contents page noting that
Troilus and Cressida
appeared after
Henry VIII
(
Troilus
had been added to the volume late in the printing process, after the table of contents had already been printed). The stolen Durham copy had had this insertion too. If the first and final pages were present, they should have borne the Peterhouse Library and the Bishop Cosin Library ownership stamps.
²
But even without them,
Massey acknowledged that “it wasn’t too much of an Albert Einstein–like leap” to conclude that this was the Durham First Folio.
³
So on July 8, Massey phoned Scott with the news of his identification.

He also informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which contacted Interpol and the British embassy. Later that day, Scott—who lived twelve miles from Durham Cathedral—was arrested at his home in northeast England.

Detective Inspector Mick Callan, head of Durham Constabulary’s Major Crime Team, found Scott to be “confident, arrogant, and dismissive” with police; “his manner was indignant and quite abrasive.”
⁴
Scott reportedly told the arresting officers: “I’m an alcoholic and need two bottles of top-of-the-range champagne every day, but only after 6 p.m. I hope you have some in the police station.”
⁵

The recovery of the Durham First Folio was indeed a cause for champagne. It has a wonderful provenance and (with its recovery) boasts the longest continuous single ownership of all First Folios.

In the late 1620s, a churchman named John Cosin purchased this copy in London and took it north with him to County Durham. His fame as a theologian was rapidly spreading throughout England, and in 1635, he was appointed Master of Peterhouse, the oldest college at the University of Cambridge. But he supported
the royalists during the English civil war, and when the monarchy was overthrown in 1644, Cosin had to flee to France along with other supporters of King Charles I. During his exile, his folio was incorporated into the Peterhouse Library along with his other books.

When the British monarchy was restored in 1660, Cosin returned from France. He was named Bishop of Durham, and, with his recovered books, built a public Episcopal library on Palace Green next to Durham Cathedral. A letter that accompanies the volume reports that Bishop Cosin bequeathed the First Folio to the clergy of his diocese in 1672. The Cosin Library subsequently became part of the Durham University Library, but the First Folio continued to be housed at Palace Green for over three centuries, until December 10, 1998, when the Cosin Library was the target of a multimillion-dollar heist. The First Folio was stolen, along with a fourteenth-century manuscript translation of the New Testament, two works by the tenth-century poet Aelfric, and a fifteenth-century manuscript of a Chaucer poem. Investigators assumed the job was the work of professional thieves who had connections to the international black market.

Now, a decade later, a new culprit had emerged: Raymond Scott.

A week after his arrest and out on bail, true to his word, Scott sipped Dom Perignon from a jeweled
champagne flute while being interviewed by the
Washington Post
and the
Daily Mail;
the reporters gushed about “his gold Versace ring, his diamond Rolex, and succession of exquisite cars: a Rolls-Royce, an Aston Martin, a Lamborghini, a silver Ferrari.”
⁶
Scott crafted an image of himself as a “dilettante” who “dabbled” in antiques and rare books, waxing philosophically about the experience of connoisseurship: “When you touch an antique, you seem to reach back through the centuries to the person who actually created it.”
⁷