Late at night on July 13th, 1972, an unknown person entered the University of Manchester’s Library and violently smashed the plate glass top
Late at night on July 13th, 1972, an unknown person entered the University of Manchester’s Library and violently smashed the plate glass top of an exhibition case, stealing the contents. Inside was one of the most famous, most valuable books in existence: the library’s near-perfect edition of one of Shakespeare’s First Folios. This theft is the most mysterious of all the stolen First Folios. More than fifty years have passed, and this First Folio—one of the 750 printed in 1623 and of the estimated 232 known copies across the globe today—is still missing...
...It is worth meditating on the language of seduction and magic all these fans of Shakespeare attribute to the First Folio, no matter their personal feelings. As it stands, the First Folios have become a kind of “commodity fetish” in Western culture, to use Adam G. Hooks description. Zachary Lesser, similarly, describes this phenomenon as “foilolatry” (i.e. idolatry of folio). Take, for example, the story of Edwin Forrest’s copy, which he preserved in a glass case only for it to burn to ashes in a fire shortly after his death. The fragments of this First Folio are preserved in a sarcophagus in the rare book library at the University of Pennsylvania. Hooks writes of this incident, “Even in ashes…Shakespeare’s power is preserved.”
