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On June 18, 1857, Henry Clay Folger Jr, American businessman/Shakespeare fan was born. From the article:
"Folger was an avid collector of Shakespeareana, assembling the world's largest collection of First Folio editions of Shakespeare's plays.[3] The first rare book Folger acquired was a 1685 copy of the Fourth Folio, purchased in 1889 for $107.50. He purchased his first original copy of the First Folio four years later, in 1893. Unlike other wealthy collectors of the period, like Henry E. Huntington and J.P. Morgan, Folger favored "imperfect" copies of rare volumes, with their marginalia and other markings. Following this trend, his Folio collection was marked with diversity in provenance and condition. He preferred to purchase Early Editions of books published between 1567 and 1606, in addition to manuscripts of the period. Based on their collective knowledge of Latin and French, and Emily's proficiency in German, the couple also favored rare volumes published on the Continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The couple was less interested in art collection, and many of the Shakespeare-related paintings they purchased were misattributed to artists like Thomas Gainsborough.
The Folgers chose items to purchase from booksellers' catalogues, which were initially perused and marked up by Emily, before she passed them on to Henry, who kept an extensive and precise list of items he intended to bid on. If possible, he inspected an item personally before purchasing it. He also avoided consulting scholarly experts about rare volumes, preferring his own and Emily's expertise, as she received an M.A. from Vassar College in 1896 for a thesis on Shakespeare. Folger used professional booksellers as middlemen at auctions, believing that the concealment of his identity would keep prices low. Due to the growing size of the collection and their concern for fireproofing, eventually few of the Folgers' acquisitions were stored in their living space. They kept an extensive card catalog at home in Brooklyn, and when traveling, took a smaller, annotated set of check lists along with them. The collection itself was stored among several fireproof warehouse companies throughout Manhattan, in specially-designed wooden cases originally meant to hold two five-gallon cans of oil each. Frederick Fales, a co-worker of Folger's at Standard Oil, initially designed and ordered these air-tight wooden cases for company use.[4] Some of the most valuable items were kept in bank vaults, or in a safe in Folger's office.
Folger financed a half-century of collecting with his Standard Oil salary and extensive investments in the company. His high placement at Standard Oil also allowed him to take out loans with his friend Charles Millard Pratt, John D. Rockefeller, and even his wife, to fund his purchases. He generally paid for items in cash, a strategy that earned him the favor of many booksellers who needed immediate funds. Folger also preferred to purchase whole collections, like the Halliwell-Phillipps collection, acquired in 1908, because bulk purchases drove down prices of individual items.[1]
In 1909, Folger established a Shakespeare Prize at Amherst; winning students won a cash prize, and their essays joined Folger's collection and currently reside in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger also made donations to Amherst College's library, contributing many duplicate volumes purchased at auction to the College. The most valuable of these donations were two leaves from a Gutenberg Bible.[1] "
"Folger was an avid collector of Shakespeareana, assembling the world's largest collection of First Folio editions of Shakespeare's plays.[3] The first rare book Folger acquired was a 1685 copy of the Fourth Folio, purchased in 1889 for $107.50. He purchased his first original copy of the First Folio four years later, in 1893. Unlike other wealthy collectors of the period, like Henry E. Huntington and J.P. Morgan, Folger favored "imperfect" copies of rare volumes, with their marginalia and other markings. Following this trend, his Folio collection was marked with diversity in provenance and condition. He preferred to purchase Early Editions of books published between 1567 and 1606, in addition to manuscripts of the period. Based on their collective knowledge of Latin and French, and Emily's proficiency in German, the couple also favored rare volumes published on the Continent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The couple was less interested in art collection, and many of the Shakespeare-related paintings they purchased were misattributed to artists like Thomas Gainsborough.
The Folgers chose items to purchase from booksellers' catalogues, which were initially perused and marked up by Emily, before she passed them on to Henry, who kept an extensive and precise list of items he intended to bid on. If possible, he inspected an item personally before purchasing it. He also avoided consulting scholarly experts about rare volumes, preferring his own and Emily's expertise, as she received an M.A. from Vassar College in 1896 for a thesis on Shakespeare. Folger used professional booksellers as middlemen at auctions, believing that the concealment of his identity would keep prices low. Due to the growing size of the collection and their concern for fireproofing, eventually few of the Folgers' acquisitions were stored in their living space. They kept an extensive card catalog at home in Brooklyn, and when traveling, took a smaller, annotated set of check lists along with them. The collection itself was stored among several fireproof warehouse companies throughout Manhattan, in specially-designed wooden cases originally meant to hold two five-gallon cans of oil each. Frederick Fales, a co-worker of Folger's at Standard Oil, initially designed and ordered these air-tight wooden cases for company use.[4] Some of the most valuable items were kept in bank vaults, or in a safe in Folger's office.
Folger financed a half-century of collecting with his Standard Oil salary and extensive investments in the company. His high placement at Standard Oil also allowed him to take out loans with his friend Charles Millard Pratt, John D. Rockefeller, and even his wife, to fund his purchases. He generally paid for items in cash, a strategy that earned him the favor of many booksellers who needed immediate funds. Folger also preferred to purchase whole collections, like the Halliwell-Phillipps collection, acquired in 1908, because bulk purchases drove down prices of individual items.[1]
In 1909, Folger established a Shakespeare Prize at Amherst; winning students won a cash prize, and their essays joined Folger's collection and currently reside in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger also made donations to Amherst College's library, contributing many duplicate volumes purchased at auction to the College. The most valuable of these donations were two leaves from a Gutenberg Bible.[1] "
Henry Clay Folger - Wikipedia
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The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio
Today it is the most valuable book in the world. Recently one sold for over five million dollars. It rescued the name of William Shakespeare and half of his ...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on June 18, 1857 American businessman/Shakespeare fan Henry Clay Folger Jr, was born
Image: Julie Ainsworth, Folger collection of eighty-two First Folios in the STC vault.
Background from doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/the-folger-shakespeare-library
"Henry Clay Folger Jr. (1857–1930) was born to upper-middle-class parents in New York and attended Amherst College, where he developed his love for Shakespeare’s plays. Emily Jordan Folger (1858–1936), who hailed from Ironton, Ohio, studied languages and literature at Vassar College. Three years after graduation, Henry's roommate, Charles Pratt, introduced Henry and Emily at an Irving Literary Circle of Brooklyn picnic on Sands Point, Long Island Sound on June 7, 1882. That year also marked the first time Henry began his “commonplace books,” notebooks in which he jotted down the English and American literature passages, quotations, and references that he found striking. Three years later, on October 6, 1885, Emily and Henry married in the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Emily earned a master’s degree in English from Vassar in 1896. Leading Shakespeare scholar Horace Howard Furness advised her senior thesis on Shakespeare. During these years, Henry worked for prominent oil companies, including Standard Oil and Pratt Oil, rising through the ranks from chairman of the manufacturing committee to assistant manager, ultimately becoming president of the incorporated Standard Oil Company of New York.
Henry Folger, 1927
The Folgers followed their passion for Shakespeare and developed a meticulous, compulsive process for acquiring folios, books, and other pieces. Henry and Emily proved an unstoppable pair: he would locate the item he desired, and she would “hunt up bibliographical details and investigate difficult allusions, and . . . advise him to purchase a book or manuscript when he was wavering and undecided.”
Over decades, the Folgers amassed an extensive collection of Shakespeareana, including “books, manuscripts, pamphlets, newspapers, playbills, scrapbooks, public documents, diaries, phonographic records, engravings, oil paintings, drawings, carvings, building models, ceramics, and much more.” The Folgers acquired, on average, six books a day for a period of over forty years, and the library included over ninety thousand volumes when it opened in 1932. “It was monotonous, doubtless, to the staid collectors and booksellers who were used to the game, but to young Folger it was the most exciting moment of his life,” art dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach wrote about the relentless pace of collecting.
Each of the Folgers’ acquisitions had a backstory. In 1899, for example, Henry set out to purchase the Augustine Vincent First Folio from its owner, Coningsby Sibthorp. After four years of back-and-forth bargaining and miscommunication, the Folgers, in 1903, successfully purchased the text for £10,000, the highest price ever paid for a book at the time. The Folgers were very secretive about their collection, and the Vincent First Folio was the only work about which Henry Folger ever wrote, publishing an essay in The Outlook in November 1907.
Building the Library
In 1910, Henry decided he wanted to curate his collection for Shakespeare scholars. He envisioned a space—unlike a public library or museum—for a couple of true Shakespeare lovers to use at a time, and he shifted his collecting efforts to match this mission. The Folgers slowed their pursuit of the most expensive volumes in order to redirect their resources to purchasing land and paying for construction.
The Folgers considered several locations for the library before ultimately choosing Washington, D.C. “I finally concluded I would give it to Washington; for I am an American," Henry said, emphasizing his patriotism and desire for a “national” collection.
For nine years, the Folgers eyed a string of properties on a block of land around the Capitol, 760 East Capitol Street between 2nd and 3rd Streets SE. When they found out that the Library of Congress had made plans to expand there, the Folgers worked with Congress to secure the rights to the land in 1928, using personal connections with the Library of Congress to exempt their parcel of land.
Often touted “the world's greatest monument to Shakespeare,” the marble building featured depictions of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays and a Tudor-style interior, complete with high ceilings, wooden beams, stained glass windows, and, of course, over twenty thousand books and eighteen thousand manuscripts.
Henry Folger did not survive to see his dream come to fruition: he died suddenly from a pulmonary embolism on June 11, 1930, two years before the library’s formal dedication, in April 1932. Emily died soon thereafter, in 1936. The Folger Library’s future was in the hands of its directors and patrons.
The Folger Shakespeare Library continued to grow and expand, under new directors and their initiatives. In 1935, the library’s board of trustees established annual fellowships for Shakespeare scholars. Two years later, in 1937, the library acquired the library of Sir Leicester Harmsworth, an English antiquarian. Composed of more than nine thousand volumes published between 1475 and 1640, the Harmsworth collection transformed the Folger Shakespeare Library into one the largest collections of its kind in the world, rivaled only by the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, California, the Bodleian at Oxford University, and the British Museum.
The library continued to operate during the Second World War, but administrators relocated thirty thousand of the museum’s rarest and most valuable volumes to Amherst College for safekeeping.
Institutional Governance
In line with his exacting collection practices, Henry laid precise groundwork for the governance of his institution. A board of trustees, under the auspices of Amherst College, and museum directors would determine who could study in the Reading Room, which volumes to purchase, and which exhibitions to launch.
Henry, however, kept his plan a secret from everyone but his wife, and the trustees of Amherst College, who were to administer the collection, learned of this only after the terms of Folger’s will were published in newspapers. The Massachusetts Legislature had to amend the Amherst College charter in order to meet Henry’s requests.
For the first decade of its existence, the Folger Shakespeare Library operated under the direction of two, effectively equal, codirectors: Joseph Quincy Adams, previously an English professor at Cornell, and William A. Slade, who had worked for the Library of Congress. Adams supervised scholarship at the library, and Slade focused on the administrative aspects of its day-to-day operations. (Stanley King, president of Amherst College from 1932 to 1946, recalled that Emily advocated for a third director, who would “devote his time when he joined the staff of the Folger Library to the improvement of the speech of the people of the United States,” but that the trustees ultimately did not create this position.) Adams sought to expand and catalogue the Folgers’ personal collection and to prevent duplication between the Folger and the Library of Congress."
The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio
Today it is the most valuable book in the world. Recently one sold for over five million dollars. It rescued the name of William Shakespeare and half of his plays from oblivion. In The Millionaire and the Bard, Andrea Mays tells the miraculous and romantic story of the making of the First Folio and of the American industrialist Henry Folger whose pursuit of the book became a lifelong obsession.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFkXzCJjq3M
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC (Join to see) Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen Lt Col Charlie Brown Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price Maj Marty Hogan SCPO Morris Ramsey SSG John Ross SGT Mark Halmrast Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. SGT Gregory LawritsonSPC Margaret Higgins SrA Christopher Wright Cpl Gabriel F. Cynthia Croft
Image: Julie Ainsworth, Folger collection of eighty-two First Folios in the STC vault.
Background from doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/the-folger-shakespeare-library
"Henry Clay Folger Jr. (1857–1930) was born to upper-middle-class parents in New York and attended Amherst College, where he developed his love for Shakespeare’s plays. Emily Jordan Folger (1858–1936), who hailed from Ironton, Ohio, studied languages and literature at Vassar College. Three years after graduation, Henry's roommate, Charles Pratt, introduced Henry and Emily at an Irving Literary Circle of Brooklyn picnic on Sands Point, Long Island Sound on June 7, 1882. That year also marked the first time Henry began his “commonplace books,” notebooks in which he jotted down the English and American literature passages, quotations, and references that he found striking. Three years later, on October 6, 1885, Emily and Henry married in the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Emily earned a master’s degree in English from Vassar in 1896. Leading Shakespeare scholar Horace Howard Furness advised her senior thesis on Shakespeare. During these years, Henry worked for prominent oil companies, including Standard Oil and Pratt Oil, rising through the ranks from chairman of the manufacturing committee to assistant manager, ultimately becoming president of the incorporated Standard Oil Company of New York.
Henry Folger, 1927
The Folgers followed their passion for Shakespeare and developed a meticulous, compulsive process for acquiring folios, books, and other pieces. Henry and Emily proved an unstoppable pair: he would locate the item he desired, and she would “hunt up bibliographical details and investigate difficult allusions, and . . . advise him to purchase a book or manuscript when he was wavering and undecided.”
Over decades, the Folgers amassed an extensive collection of Shakespeareana, including “books, manuscripts, pamphlets, newspapers, playbills, scrapbooks, public documents, diaries, phonographic records, engravings, oil paintings, drawings, carvings, building models, ceramics, and much more.” The Folgers acquired, on average, six books a day for a period of over forty years, and the library included over ninety thousand volumes when it opened in 1932. “It was monotonous, doubtless, to the staid collectors and booksellers who were used to the game, but to young Folger it was the most exciting moment of his life,” art dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach wrote about the relentless pace of collecting.
Each of the Folgers’ acquisitions had a backstory. In 1899, for example, Henry set out to purchase the Augustine Vincent First Folio from its owner, Coningsby Sibthorp. After four years of back-and-forth bargaining and miscommunication, the Folgers, in 1903, successfully purchased the text for £10,000, the highest price ever paid for a book at the time. The Folgers were very secretive about their collection, and the Vincent First Folio was the only work about which Henry Folger ever wrote, publishing an essay in The Outlook in November 1907.
Building the Library
In 1910, Henry decided he wanted to curate his collection for Shakespeare scholars. He envisioned a space—unlike a public library or museum—for a couple of true Shakespeare lovers to use at a time, and he shifted his collecting efforts to match this mission. The Folgers slowed their pursuit of the most expensive volumes in order to redirect their resources to purchasing land and paying for construction.
The Folgers considered several locations for the library before ultimately choosing Washington, D.C. “I finally concluded I would give it to Washington; for I am an American," Henry said, emphasizing his patriotism and desire for a “national” collection.
For nine years, the Folgers eyed a string of properties on a block of land around the Capitol, 760 East Capitol Street between 2nd and 3rd Streets SE. When they found out that the Library of Congress had made plans to expand there, the Folgers worked with Congress to secure the rights to the land in 1928, using personal connections with the Library of Congress to exempt their parcel of land.
Often touted “the world's greatest monument to Shakespeare,” the marble building featured depictions of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays and a Tudor-style interior, complete with high ceilings, wooden beams, stained glass windows, and, of course, over twenty thousand books and eighteen thousand manuscripts.
Henry Folger did not survive to see his dream come to fruition: he died suddenly from a pulmonary embolism on June 11, 1930, two years before the library’s formal dedication, in April 1932. Emily died soon thereafter, in 1936. The Folger Library’s future was in the hands of its directors and patrons.
The Folger Shakespeare Library continued to grow and expand, under new directors and their initiatives. In 1935, the library’s board of trustees established annual fellowships for Shakespeare scholars. Two years later, in 1937, the library acquired the library of Sir Leicester Harmsworth, an English antiquarian. Composed of more than nine thousand volumes published between 1475 and 1640, the Harmsworth collection transformed the Folger Shakespeare Library into one the largest collections of its kind in the world, rivaled only by the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, California, the Bodleian at Oxford University, and the British Museum.
The library continued to operate during the Second World War, but administrators relocated thirty thousand of the museum’s rarest and most valuable volumes to Amherst College for safekeeping.
Institutional Governance
In line with his exacting collection practices, Henry laid precise groundwork for the governance of his institution. A board of trustees, under the auspices of Amherst College, and museum directors would determine who could study in the Reading Room, which volumes to purchase, and which exhibitions to launch.
Henry, however, kept his plan a secret from everyone but his wife, and the trustees of Amherst College, who were to administer the collection, learned of this only after the terms of Folger’s will were published in newspapers. The Massachusetts Legislature had to amend the Amherst College charter in order to meet Henry’s requests.
For the first decade of its existence, the Folger Shakespeare Library operated under the direction of two, effectively equal, codirectors: Joseph Quincy Adams, previously an English professor at Cornell, and William A. Slade, who had worked for the Library of Congress. Adams supervised scholarship at the library, and Slade focused on the administrative aspects of its day-to-day operations. (Stanley King, president of Amherst College from 1932 to 1946, recalled that Emily advocated for a third director, who would “devote his time when he joined the staff of the Folger Library to the improvement of the speech of the people of the United States,” but that the trustees ultimately did not create this position.) Adams sought to expand and catalogue the Folgers’ personal collection and to prevent duplication between the Folger and the Library of Congress."
The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio
Today it is the most valuable book in the world. Recently one sold for over five million dollars. It rescued the name of William Shakespeare and half of his plays from oblivion. In The Millionaire and the Bard, Andrea Mays tells the miraculous and romantic story of the making of the First Folio and of the American industrialist Henry Folger whose pursuit of the book became a lifelong obsession.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFkXzCJjq3M
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC (Join to see) Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen Lt Col Charlie Brown Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price Maj Marty Hogan SCPO Morris Ramsey SSG John Ross SGT Mark Halmrast Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. SGT Gregory LawritsonSPC Margaret Higgins SrA Christopher Wright Cpl Gabriel F. Cynthia Croft
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An absolutely interesting read SGT (Join to see)! There are things in our lives that we will never have the privilege of learning because, after our schools, colleges and training curriculums the thirst for knowledge will dissapear for many adults.
This is why I love reading your posts. You always bring interesting posts in which I learn a great deal in areas I never would have sought out.
And Shakespear...
...don’t get me started on Shakespear.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more.
It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
~William Shakespear, Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5
Read and memorized as a Junior in high school, approximately 30 years ago.
I hated school, in spite of bragging on myself, however, I was extremely intelligent and could have kept an excellent GPA. However, I decided to play it easy with a lot of C’s, a few B’s, more D’s than i care to admit, and topped it off with a few F’s.
I was alone and in charge of myself. My family, at that time had left me and i had to find places to live.
This act, however, this single act from Macbeth got my attention. I think it summed up how i felt at the time.
Anyway, keep up with the posts David, I love them!
COL Mikel J. Burroughs,PVT Mark Brown,SP5 Mark Kuzinski,SSgt Robert Marx,SGT Robert George,SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth,SPC Margaret Higgins,SMSgt Minister Gerald A. "Doc" Thomas,LTC Stephen F.,SPC Douglas Bolton,SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL,TSgt Joe C.,Brig Gen Jim Jaeger,LTC Jeff Shearer,Sally Thomas,Lt Col Charlie Brown
This is why I love reading your posts. You always bring interesting posts in which I learn a great deal in areas I never would have sought out.
And Shakespear...
...don’t get me started on Shakespear.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more.
It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
~William Shakespear, Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5
Read and memorized as a Junior in high school, approximately 30 years ago.
I hated school, in spite of bragging on myself, however, I was extremely intelligent and could have kept an excellent GPA. However, I decided to play it easy with a lot of C’s, a few B’s, more D’s than i care to admit, and topped it off with a few F’s.
I was alone and in charge of myself. My family, at that time had left me and i had to find places to live.
This act, however, this single act from Macbeth got my attention. I think it summed up how i felt at the time.
Anyway, keep up with the posts David, I love them!
COL Mikel J. Burroughs,PVT Mark Brown,SP5 Mark Kuzinski,SSgt Robert Marx,SGT Robert George,SGT David A. 'Cowboy' Groth,SPC Margaret Higgins,SMSgt Minister Gerald A. "Doc" Thomas,LTC Stephen F.,SPC Douglas Bolton,SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL,TSgt Joe C.,Brig Gen Jim Jaeger,LTC Jeff Shearer,Sally Thomas,Lt Col Charlie Brown
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