The Shakespeare Thefts by Eric Rasmussen Read Free Book Online Page A

The damaged pages will be repaired with Japanese paper and wheat starch paste and resewn on to the new cords. New boards—the hard covers of books—will be made and laced onto the cords. Then the First Folio will be rebound in dark blue goatskin. Finally, the title will be lettered directly onto the spine with gold leaf, and a drop-back box, suitable forstoring and protecting valuable books, will be made to protect the binding.
    Durham’s stolen medieval manuscripts may never be recovered. But noted author Bill Bryson, who serves as chancellor of Durham University, called the First Folio “arguably the most important book in English literature” as he welcomed “this wonderfully important book home to the university and city.” 29

CHAPTER FOUR
THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART
    I am to wait, though waiting so be hell
.
    —Shakespeare’s Sonnet 58
    My team has been waiting to see a privately owned copy of the First Folio for two decades. In 1991, Anthony James West learned that a family in Tokyo, Japan, owned a First Folio. Anthony contacted the distinguished Japanese rare book dealer Mitsuo Nitta, who had brokered the sale of many First Folios in Japan in the 1970s and who had sold this copy to the family in question, asking if he might be allowed to examine their book. This is a common practice for us: We get in touch with private owners throughout theworld regularly, usually through intermediaries, asking if we might have the privilege of examining their folios. Their greatest worry is maintaining their privacy—no one wants to call attention to the fact that they have a copy of this enormously valuable book in their home. Most owners we contact agree to let us look at their books because they are impressed by how seriously we take their security and privacy arrangements.
    Mr. Nitta replied that the owner, a Mr. Kamijo, had died and had left a provision in his will that “access to the volume was proscribed for thirteen years from the date of his death.” 1 This was an odd provision, and uncommon for Japanese wills. But we were willing to wait.
    After the required number of years had elapsed, I got in touch with Mr. Nitta again. The disappointing response: The owner “is not interesting to sell or show this copy to others.” 2
    Of course, now we
really
wanted to see it. We had learned from Mr. Nitta that there is a red stain on the Kamijo family copy. If this is true, then it may be linked to a First Folio once owned by an individual named Jean Claude Daubuz, who described it in 1901 as having been stained on “nearly every page … in the upper corner with wine or some other red liquid.” When the Daubuz copy was sold at auction in 1932 to an unknown buyer, the Sotheby’s catalog also noted that it had “a pink stain” in the right-hand top corner.
    Could it be blood? Members of the team noticed something suspicious in the course of our research: A surprising number of owners met their demise shortly after getting their hands on a First Folio.
    The media is fond of observing that Sir Paul Getty purchased his copy of the First Folio just “six weeks before his death in 2003.” 3 As it happens, the story is somewhat exaggerated. Getty purchased his copy from Oxford’s Oriel College in April 2002 and died in April 2003. (The copy Getty purchased—a particularly prized one, intact but for two leaves and still in its original binding—was given to Oriel College in 1786 by Lord Leigh, who was a certified lunatic and had spent several years in an asylum.)
    James Boswell the younger, the son of Dr. Johnson’s biographer, purchased the First Folio that had belonged to the celebrated actor John Philip Kemble in January 1821. On February 4, 1822, Boswell died in his chambers, at the age of forty-three. The Boswell First Folio then passed to his only brother, Sir Alexander Boswell, who was killed twenty days later in a duel with James Stuart.
    In 1829, Sir Frederick Francis Baker acquired the First Folio that