Books You may have noticed recently the publicity surrounding the sale of four Shakespeare Folios at Sothebys later this month. Here's a version of the story in the Smithsonian Magazine although there were dozens of others, mainly reprinting the contents of the press release. It's a rare occasion when F1, F2, F3 and F4 are being sold as a single lot. Having made a similar trip in 2022, I immediately booked tickets for London, for yesterday, to view the First Folio and glance at the others.
This was possibly going to be the first and last time I could see it, especially since it isn't actually on the list. The four Folios originally surfaced at a Christies sale in 2016 (although I didn't notice). Christies listed them separately but they were snatched by a single buyer which is why they're together now. The four of them then cost the buyer around £2.5m, which considering the 2022 sale of just a First Folio in a nice display case went for £2m, this was a bargain. The other volumes usually go for several hundred thousand pounds each.
It's the provenance from the Sothebys press release which allowed me to make the connection with the Christies sale. Both auction houses mention in their sales details that F1, F3 and F4 they were bought around 1800 by the collector George Augustus William Shuckburgh-Evelyn then sat on a shelf in the family mansion for centuries until there was a clear out. The Second Folio was added by whoever bought the lot at Christies in 2016 and selling them again as a job lot now.
George Shuckburgh-Evelyn, as the Wikipedia lists him, was a politician, mathematician and politician. He pioneered the the collation of price indexes. He observed changes in the boiling points of water at different pressures aiding the collaboration of thermometers. He built his own telescope and observed features of the lunar surface. He has a crater on the moon named for him. He also served in the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament for Warwickshire from 1780 until his death in 1804, so his ownership of the Fs was apt.
Since the catalogue of all known First Folios was published in 2012 and this didn't surface until 2016, it's effectively unlisted and hasn't been seen by academic eyes. Who knows if Eric Rasmussen has dropped by in the meantime readying material for a second edition. Nevertheless, I was all ready to take in the couple of pages Sothebys had chosen to show us during the viewing period. Would there be notes in the margin in Shuckburgh-Evelyn's own hand.
The empty space and title of this post will indicate that nothing went to plan. Wandering into Sothebys, I was surprised by how quiet the auction house was but assumed that was due to it being the middle of the afternoon. Feeling slightly under-dressed in my Frozen princesses t-shirt and jeans, I asked a security guard where the Folios were on display. Blank face. Don't know. I asked another, similarly no idea what I was talking about. She pointed me back towards the reception desk.
Reception confirmed what I feared. They'd been withdrawn from sale and weren't even in the building. The explanation he seemed to be given by someone on the phone was that they might be in the process of being offered around British institutions first before potentially leaving the country which made sense. I was surprisingly sanguine about it. I should have been suspicious when the page at the Sothebys website went offline. But I assumed it was a technical error. Too many outlets had written about the sale for it not to be happening.
After a cup of coffee in the restaurant, in a bid to make the trip not feel completely wasted, I walked to Covent Garden and finally visited the London Transport Museum, which is certainly too big to visit an hour before closing, especially if your body's tired of travelling and bought a few fridge magnets. After a burger and fries at Five Guys, it was time to return to Euston and catch the train home. It's a sign I'm getting older that I think I'm still getting over all of the walking I did on Friday. My heart don't with to roam.
Yesterday, a piece by Kate Maltby went up on The Observer website which offers a more detailed explanation as to what happened to the Folios:
"... a funny thing happened when I rang Sotheby’s and started asking questions on behalf of The Observer. The auction, I was suddenly told, had been cancelled. The listing was scrubbed from the website; the “set” had been privately sold.
"This may be cockup rather than conspiracy: two antiquarian sources suggested to me that the private sale had been in the works for some time, and that “the sale should never have been announced” publicly. At last week’s London’s Rare Books Fair, where Stephen Fry and Graham Brady were among the men in suits queuing outside the Saatchi Gallery, the gossip was of furious collectors outmanoeuvred by a megabid."
So there we have it. This Folio remains inaccessible even to academics as whoever bought them at Christies in 2016 has sold them to another private buyer. If Sothebys hadn't made the sale public, us normals would never have known about them.
But I do hold Sothebys somewhat responsible for my predicament. Rather than simply yanking the press release from the website leading to the generic 404 and some intimidating telephone numbers, a more helpful option would have been a note saying that the item had been removed from sale and that viewings had been cancelled. Even Tesco tells its shoppers when a product has sold out. Anyway, I've emailed Sothebys with that suggestion and this Tesco gag. Let's see what happens.
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