Books Since there's now a checklist and everything, I've been trying to decide what to call the endeavour of trying to see all of the first editions of the collections of Shakespeare's plays and it's not until I was standing on a platform at Leeds Station waiting for the connecting train between Liverpool and Skipton that I decided to go back to my very brief flirtation with drawing lines through train class numbers in another type of book and decided I've been Folio Spotting. I'm a foliospotter.
So this erm, foliospotting trip was to the Craven Museum and Gallery in Skipton which has a partial edition in its exhibition space. As Rasmussen and West's The Shakespeare First Folios (the foliospotters equivalent of the Diesel & Electric Loco Register) indicates there aren't actually that many copies internationally that you can apprehend, most of them only brought out on special occasions either for security reasons or due to their fragility.
The Craven was recently nominated for a Art Fund Museum of the Year award and it's this report in The Guardian which prompted me to book at ticket to Yorkshire. The last time I visited Skipton was in my undergraduate days when you could travel anywhere in West Yorkshire by bus from Leeds at the weekend for 60p. Skipton would have been the furthest I went, two hours there, two hours back. I'm not sure I would have had the patience now, although it was roughly three hours from Liverpool by train.
Judging by the accession number. the book seems like a very late entry into the catalogue because it had only recently been made available to the public as a First Folio. For much of its time at the Craven it was been designated as a Second Folio, and it wasn't until 2003 that the scholar Anthony West, the West of the The Shakespeare First Folios, studied the pages and determined that they were from the 1623 original. As he and Rasmussen say, "Security was immediately increased".
But it took until March 2011 for the necessary funds to be gathered for the current secure display case to be added to Craven's exhibition, which is accompanied by video explaining the importance of the book narrated by Yorkshire's own Patrick Stewart and wall panels describing the provenance of the book. The Craven Museum was recently refurbished (hence the nomination) but judging by the descriptions this corner seems like it's much the same as it was ten years before.
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The provenance of this folio is minimal. The trail begins with John James Wilkinson, who after selling his cotton and tobacco business became a naturalist studying marine insects who also had an interest in literature, but there's no indication of how he acquired it. When he died in 1919, the Folio was inherited by his sister Ann who then bequeathed it to the town of Skipton in 1936, which is when it was misidentified as a Second Folio.
The Guardian piece suggests it then sat in a cupboard beneath a sink for the intervening decades until the new identification. It was probably easily overlooked because as you can see from the digitised version, it's missing the title pages and comedies so without the front page you could imagine various staff over the years not really thinking it was anything more than a pile of old papers because why would they even have a Shakespeare First Folio?
Now that I am foliospotting, I'm going to have to step up my game. There are still plenty of documentaries to look at but with the re-opening of the Folger Shakespeare Library and its display of all the Shakespeare folios they own, I'm already looking at the logistics of visiting Washington DC. How can any foliospotter turn down the opportunity to see our equivalent of Llandudno Junction traction maintenance depot?
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