· 18 March 2020 ·

[A First Folio was to be auctioned in New York next month, but the plans have changed]

When I began to draft this post in January, an auction at Christie’s named The Exceptional Sale, headlined by a 1623 First Folio edition of my plays, was scheduled for the 24th of April in New York, New York. Two days ago (March 16th) I sat at my screen checking the information I was typing, when Christie’s started taking pages down, pulling them right out from under me. I’ve never seen that happen in real-time before.

The sale’s URL now redirects to a list of Precautionary closures and sale postponements. The Exceptional Sale itself is not listed at all. I enquired of the auction house and received a courteous reply that while this sale “has not explicitly been postponed yet, it is expected that all March and April dates will be moved”. I had already snagged the link to the First Folio’s description, so you can still look at the page as long as they don’t pull it. I’ll update my post or write another one when I learn anything new.

20 MARCH UPDATE: Classic Week in New York, which includes The Exceptional Sale, is now provisionally scheduled for 8-12 June.

Until the auction takes place, the book will wait for (most of) us to become social creatures again. It has survived for four centuries, demonstrating its ability to overcome its own assortment of existential threats. So far.

Only five complete copies of the First Folio remain in private hands, and on 24 April Christie’s will offer the first complete copy to come on the market in almost two decades. It will be auctioned during Classic Week in New York, and is being sold on behalf of Mills College in Oakland, California.(from the description)

Mills College is an independent liberal arts college for women and gender-nonbinary students, in the San Francisco area. Mills finds itself in parlous financial straits. They need the money – a Mozart manuscript will also be sold. And if money problems aren’t stressful enough, the campus is currently under a shelter-in-place quarantine order, like much of the metropolis surrounding it.

This First Folio was given to Mills in 1977 by alumna Mary Louise O’Brien, a former college trustee and the daughter of an English professor there. Christie’s estimates the Folio to sell between $4,000,000 and $6,000,000, but all it takes is two deep pockets who both covet, and boom, even your little £6000 Italian Herodotus goes for £38,000. What then for a substantially complete, attractive copy of the First Folio, nearly twenty years after the last good one on the market sold for $6,166,000? Maybe I should re-write Limerick 15, change the £ to $, and add lots of zeros. I have yet to resolve the matter of my cut.

Of course I’d like this Folio to end up where folks have the opportunity to see it and engage with it as directly as prudence permits. I spent a couple of hours with one a few years ago, with, alas, glass between us. Even so. I may know its words like the back of my hand, and digitised First Folios are one of the internet’s best gifts, but there’s no substitute for putting your nose as close to the book as they’ll let you, to get a sense of its size, the density of the type on those long pages, its physicality.

Realistically, we may not even learn who comes out the winner of the eventual auction, if it includes anonymous bidders (handy word, that Anonymous). My fervent plea to any gods left under heaven is that the price is beyond the Folger’s budget if not also beyond their interest, since Henry no longer hoards Folios himself. My entreaty has nothing to do with their elemental wrengthwrength n. (uncountable) The state or condition of being wrong; wrongness; wrongfulness. See Stratfordian. about me. The Folger Shakespeare Library already entombs eighty-two of the 235 known First Folios within their mausoleum in America’s capital. That is far more than enough in one place, no matter who your Shake-Speare is.

So if you happen to have very rich, very old relatives who bequeath you upwards of eight million dollars when the bug gets them in the next couple of months, I have a suggestion for something you might do with the cash. If you think it’s insensitive of me to joke, you’re missing the point. Unlike nearly everyone alive, I’ve been through pandemic plagues before. The only thing substantially different about this one is the speed of its transmission across large distances, aided by aeroplanes and automobiles. The rest is just details, variations in symptoms and mortality rates. Gallows humour is a time-tested defence mechanism that helps to keep real peril from overwhelming us with more worry than our minds and hearts can handle. A posthumous poet I may be, but I have people I care about who are already closely threatened by this thing, just like almost everyone else has, or will have soon enough.

More words, words, words about the First Folio:

• • 393 Years of Printing: Plays to Pancakes on a Pilgrimage
• · My visit with a copy of the First Folio
• · 26 February 2017
• • Guest Poet Ben Jonson: To the Reader. Try Again.
• · Jonson’s second attempt at his First Folio introduction
• · 04 March 2017
• • The Graver’s Strife
• · Was Martin Droeshout a lousy engraver?
• · 26 April 2019

• • Selected First Folio photos courtesy of Christie’s [christies.com]
• · Don’t pay too much attention to the details they provide in their description. They strike the popular chords and I’ve read worse, but it’s no more than conventional advertising copy. These folks are merchants who stand to earn a handsome commission based on the book’s sale price. They aren’t in the Shakespeare business.

VERO NIHIL VERIUS