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{"id":17023,"date":"2015-02-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1849"},"modified":"2015-02-09T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-09T00:00:00","slug":"folgers-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/02\/folgers-shakespeare\/","title":{"rendered":"Buying Up the Bard"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

The TLS <\/em>reviewer of Stephen Grant\u2019s\u00a0Collecting Shakespeare<\/a> summarizes some of the intrigue, skullduggery, and determination that lie behind the creation of Washington\u2019s Folger Shakespeare library:<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring their long marriage, the diminutive couple (he was five foot four, she five foot) devoted themselves to collecting books, pictures and objects (relics made from the Stratford mulberry tree were especially sought after) related to Shakespeare. What started as \u2018an agreeable recreation,\u2019 Henry Folger said, soon became \u2018a delightful hobby\u2019 and eventually \u2018rather a tyrannical master.\u2019 They pursued the subject with what comes over as a chilly obsessiveness. They avoided social life as much as they could, limited their time with their families, lived very frugally and modestly in rented homes, with rented furniture and a small domestic staff. Grant leaves little room to doubt that Folger was \u2018tight with his money\u2019; he haggled over prices with book dealers, doing his best to drive them down and \u2018could be counted on to pay, but only on his terms.\u2019 Those terms included absolutely no publicity. An article on Folger, written nearly two decades after his death, described him as \u2018shy, taciturn,\u2019 adding that he \u2018lived by three rules: Never tell what you\u2019ve done, what you are doing, or what you are going to do.\u2019 \u2018The American public,\u2019 Grant says, \u2018knew almost nothing about\u2019 Folger. The couple concealed the extent of their acquisitions, failing to mention in 1924 in the one interview they ever gave that by then they owned sixty-seven copies of the First Folio.\u201d<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t just a personality quirk. It was good business. At the time, rare books were fairly cheap, and the Folgers \u00a0knew that prices would soar if word got out that they were buying up old Shakespeare volumes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In any event, their strategy worked. When they were done, \u201cthey left 92,000 books, a remarkable building (it had air conditioning and made relatively early use of aluminium) on Capitol Hill, with a reading room, exhibition hall and theatre, and a considerable endowment, all of which have made the Folger one of the great libraries in the world and a wonderful place to work in and to visit.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"