The Fateful Story of the First Folio

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From Shakespeare to Sappho: Read the stories behind three artifacts of genius tells a great story about the First Folio.  Published in 1623, just seven years after Shakespeare died, it collected his 36 plays, half of which had never been published before.  It was given to the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1624, but in 1664 the Library sold the First Folio.  After all, they had the Third Folio, and found no need to keep an old book.

The famous edition had virtually disappeared, apparently, until an Oxford student popped up with it in 1905.  An anonymous collector offered to buy it for £3000 (equivalent to $531,000 in 2014 valuation), but the owners gave the Library a chance to raise funds in Kickstarter style, long before there was Kickstarter.  In the end, the Library undid its foolish act of 1664, and that collector (Henry Clay Folger) came to house the largest collection of First Folios in the Folger Shakespeare Library.