Still feeling as though someone would halt my progress at any moment, I cautiously followed the signs to the darkened gallery area and towards a room which looked like it might house the treasure which I'd come to see. At which point a hand was immediately unfurled by a security person to bar my way. Here we go. But I looked properly and saw I was about the stray into the jewellery section and for obvious reasons backpacks are prohibited. So I asked instead where the thing I'd come to see, the Shakespeare First Folio, was as the guard duly gave me directions through another couple of rooms and I relaxed. This was all fine. As is so often the case in London, nobody cares.
Sure enough, in one of the larger rooms in the gallery area, on the far wall in the wooden cabinet (as you can see in the accompanying photograph was a Shakespeare First Folio). I feel comfortable talking about it in the past tense because by now it is already being prepared for its flight to New York, where, as this Guardian article from last week describes, it'll be up for auction. The price tag in the label indicates that its valued between $1.5m and $2.5m which made it (having glanced at some other labels in the same room) by far the most expensive item on display but there it sat unnoticed amongst the much lesser valued Henry Moores, Bridget Rileys and Ben Nicholsons.
The cabinet and accompanying wall carving go unexplained. Do they come with the book or have these been added by Sotheby's to add a bit of drama to the display? Perhaps they were created by one of the previous owners as a form of reverence of the kind usually reserved for religious texts. Much as a devout person might open a family bible on special occasions, might there have been a Shakespeare fan who would reverently unlock the case now and then to flick through the pages and gaze on his words before shutting the lid and return to the Penguin paperbacks they use on a daily basis. Like the Bible, Shakespeare's Folio seems to have as much power as an object as the words it contains.
The reason for making this pilgrimage was because this is one of the rarest of the Folios, being one of only twenty or so which are still in private hands. With a provenance which stretches back to the early 17th century (as outlined in the article) and sure to end up in a vault somewhere, this would be my only chance to see it. Of course, all of the folios look roughly the same. Sotheby's opened this edition to the first page of Twelfth Night, perhaps because on the opposite side after the conclusion of All's Well That Ends Well, there are some illegible handwritten notes which help to identify this particular copy from the others. But these books were designed to be identical (despite typesetting errors) and I've already seen a few.
Nevertheless, I have a list and with so few on public display in the UK anyway, it's always worth having a look, if only for the surrounding experiences. Had it not been for this book, I might never have been to Sotheby's and realised that apart from the book, that its possible to gaze at various museum level paintings and sculpture by the likes of Henry Moore, Bridget Riley and Ben Nicholson that most likely will never be available again to the general public (outside of exhibition loans). Perhaps in the next few years I should make an effort to see more of them and hopefully somewhere were I won't feel quite so out of place. Which proverbially says more about me than it probably does about them.
Updated 22/07/2022: The Folio sold for $2m which means it was the most expensive item in the room that day.
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